


All We See or Seem

by strange_estrangement



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Cameos, F/F, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-09-22 06:25:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17054861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strange_estrangement/pseuds/strange_estrangement
Summary: Blue Sargent—psychic's daughter and friend to raven girls—hovers at the edges of the spectacular and finds herself participating.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All the thanks in the world to [thegeminisage](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thegeminisage) for constant handholding, thorough editing, and comments such as "I LOVE BLUE FIERCELY WITH ALL MY HEART." Same, tbh.
> 
> I beg you, please view [this art](https://66.media.tumblr.com/36e1e28989cc7ac39dc0756a282bd9bb/tumblr_pjxzadiPx91rx6x5e_1280.png) of Kavinsky, lovingly rendered by [ald0us](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ald0us), which I've waited impatiently to share for three entire months.

Blue was going to a Kavinsky party.

She’d heard about it earlier at school; Katie had sidled up to her at her locker and handed her a sticky note with an address scribbled on it. Blue, dangling the sticky off her first two fingers, had stuck it back in Katie’s face.

“What is this?”

Katie had laughed. “It’s a party! It’s—” She’d paused. “It’s a Kavinsky party.”

Sticky note still on her fingers, Blue had pasted it against the locker. “Why would I want to go to a Kavinsky party?”

Katie had giggled. “Because,” she’d nudged Blue’s shoulder, “it’s exclusive. Haven’t you heard? She’s been inviting over kids for the past eight months, almost every week, and we don’t even need to bring anything. I went last week, and it’s my turn to pass it on. Like. Like tag or something. You’re it!”

Rolling her eyes, Blue had closed her locker and spun the dial. “It is not, by definition, exclusive if it’s every week for the past eight months.”

“Okay, so maybe not exclusive. Maybe like...intimate.”

“I don’t need to be intimate,” Blue had air-quoted, “with Kavinsky.”

“No, dude, trust me. It’s a whole experience. You’re going to have a really good time.”

Blue had paused to run through her schedule, which, it turned out, was clear. She didn’t have a shift tonight, and Nino’s wasn’t until later the next day. She didn’t particularly want to ride her bike all the way across town at night, but she’d done it before. “I’ll think about it.”

Katie had bounced a little, unsticking the note from the locker and pasting it to Blue’s unicorn notebook. “Trust me,” she’d parroted again. “You’re in for a wild ride.”

And so, Blue was going to a Kavinsky party.

- 

The sticky note listed an address in a part of town not often frequented by those who attended Henrietta’s public school. Blue looked it up ahead of time and wound her finger across the screen through the development’s twisting roads. Why they couldn’t be arranged in a grid, Blue didn’t know, but she scribbled down rough directions on the same sticky note and headed downstairs.

She paused at the bottom, announcing to the house in general that she would be attending a party that evening and there was no need to wait up.

Her mother poked her head around the doorway of the living room, wine glass in hand. She looked, Blue guessed, like she was trying to decide how to implement a curfew for a child who rarely needed one. Sure enough, “Be back by 10.”

“I don’t know how late it will go.”

Maura paused. “Be back by 11.”

“Same thing.”

Maura paused for much longer. “Be careful.”

“That, I can do. See you!”

She walked out the door to the tune of Calla laughing and Persephone giggling, both probably at Maura.

The cool spring evening nipped at her hands and wrists, her nose and cheeks. Although the days melted more or less smoothly toward summer, the nights still carried spring’s dark edge. It was chilly enough that she wore jeans and a hoodie, out of which draped what could be charitably considered a tunic and what was actually a garment of indeterminate shape composed entirely of fabric scraps from various Fox Way castoffs. Blue was rather proud of it.

The shoddy yet well-loved country suburbs faded into the town center which in turn faded into less well-loved, featureless houses that all looked the same. The houses got bigger, the lawns got neater, the clutter got scarcer, and Blue felt out of her depth.

She pulled up in front of the address. This was the right place; a dozen cars fanned out from this central point, a handful clearly belonging to the richest contingent in town, all sleek lines and spoilers and blackened windows. The rest belonged to Blue’s people: pickups with rust eating at the edges and mid-size sedans past their prime—one or two borrowing pieces from other cars unfortunate enough to find their way into the town scrapyard.

The cars, parked up and down the street, pointed their noses toward the house itself, little more than a wooden skeleton with its frame upright but walls and roof missing, dirt dug up in great mounds on three sides. It was new construction on what would be, eventually, a huge house that fit right in with the finished houses Blue had passed on her way in. Now that she looked, the houses to the right were only frames too, dark and eerie without proper streetlights.

This house, also devoid of streetlights, didn’t share its cousins’ curse; Kavinsky had provided her own lights, all blacklights and neon purples and glaring reds, pulsing from the house on beat with the music, thudding, shaking the rafters.

Blue wheeled her bike onto the yard, only dirt at this point, and leaned it on its kickstand. This close to the house, she could feel the bass thumping her breastbone. She could see maybe 20 silhouettes in the house, clustered around tall tables and slouched on sofas—furniture made improbable in this barebones structure.

She lingered outside the skeletal house, waiting, until—sharp—someone pinched her side. Blue jumped. “Don’t do that!” she yelled.

“Stop lurking!” Brittany’s pupils were blown wide and dark. She was laughing, staggering a little, all artificial, chemical bravery. Blue’s reputation as endlessly cool and unfathomably weird couldn’t protect her against kids high as kites and drummed up on the bass and the lights and the spring air and their own endless futures, but she wished it could.

Brittany was right though; she was lurking. She climbed up onto the porch, one giant step without any actual stairs, and walked into the party proper.

She and her pack infamous, Kavinsky sat at the center of them all.

Legs spread out on either side of Swan’s thighs, Kavinsky leaned back against Swan’s chest, smiling, lazy, eyes closed. Kavinsky certainly hadn’t waited to get started, Blue thought, seeing empty bottles scattered around the first floor of the house, glinting with the pulsing lights. This was a substance party without the bartering, free admission for a night of teenage decadence, out of character for Kavinsky and, therefore, seductive.

Kavinsky shone in the dark—white-rimmed sunglasses, white teeth, white v-neck, bleached jeans, white Chucks—all lit up by the blacklight. She’d dressed for the occasion, and it showed, surrounded by kids with regular clothes only partially illuminated; maybe a white shirt here, white shoes there, a glimpse of a sock, a chunky bracelet to the left, a skirt to the right. Kavinsky dazzled.

Blue felt self conscious, suddenly, and she hated it. She imagined how she wanted to appear to other people and then acted accordingly—tilting her chin up, pulling her shoulders down and back, straightening her spine. She felt a little better, like she knew what she was doing and why she was there. She went to join Brittany and her group on one of the couches, opposite from Kavinsky and her pack.

She couldn’t hear much over the music, but it didn’t matter; the feeling of it was a good substitute, thudding against her chest, through the couch, and up through her body. Someone passed her a cup—she didn’t see who—so she passed it on and instead poured her own from an unopened bottle by her feet. Instinct.

Across the room, Kavinsky pulled a small baggie out of her pocket and leaned forward. She opened it and pulled out two pills, twisting around and tapping Swan on the chin, who opened her mouth obediently. She dropped both in and then leaned back to accept one of them from Swan’s tongue.

Blue’s ears turned pink. She was suddenly glad of the blacklights.

They both fell asleep, fast, Swan against the couch and Kavinsky against Swan. Blue wondered what the point was—why would you voluntarily take a party drug that just put you to sleep? She barely had time to wonder, though, before they both burst awake, hand in hand; Swan looked shaken while Kavinsky leapt off her lap, laughing, exultant, swaying dangerously and gesturing for Skov to come over and hold her up.

“Bitch! We did it! We fuckin’ did it!” Skov pounded her on the back as she jumped up to wrap her legs around Skov’s waist, her arms around her neck. She rested her chin against Skov’s shoulder, whispering something into her ear.

The whole thing was confusing. Blue looked around; the music was still pounding but all eyes were on Kavinsky and company. Kavinsky dropped down from Skov’s waist, both feet planted on the floor for all the good it did when it looked like she felt the ground swaying underneath her. She sank back onto the couch, this time laying down with her head in Jiang’s lap. She was smiling, and Jiang carded her fingers through her hair.

Soon enough, partygoers settled back into couches, sipping at their drinks. Swan turned down the music a little, enough so Blue could distinguish what the people next to her were saying. Unsettled by Kavinsky’s little display, she drained her cup and debated whether to leave before the party got any weirder; then she noticed that Proko had started making the rounds to distribute party favors. Close on Proko’s heels was Skov who, it turned out, was taking names. The party was just weird, and Blue decided she wasn’t interested in seeing the rest.

Skov and Proko advanced on their couch. She watched Brittany give her name and accept a bottle of shimmering, glittering liquid.

Proko and Skov stopped in front of her next, Proko holding out a bottle in one hand and a small, opaque bag in one hand. Blue shook her head. They both looked at each other and then back at her before Skov leaned down, leaned in close to yell “What’s your name” in her ear before straightening up.

Blue shouted this time. “No thanks!”

Skov leaned in again, lips close to her ear. “Dude, we need your name. Price of admission.” Blue could feel Skov’s breath tickling the shell of it. Skov drew back a little to look at her, still too close. Too close. Blue glanced at Skov’s lips, chapped, and away again fast. She felt, suddenly, very small.

Blue clenched her hands into fists and levered herself off the couch, the movement pushing Skov and Proko back a step. She stood as tall as she could in front of Skov, although she still had to tilt her chin up to look at her. “I said no.”

Skov stepped forward and grabbed her elbow before Proko yanked Skov back; Skov let go abruptly as Proko whispered something to her. Skov glared at Blue, and Blue glared back. She was furious, her knuckles going white with the force of it. Skov shrugged, the casualness of the gesture belied by the expression on her face, angry, before turning her back to Blue.

Blue took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, fists relaxing again, tension bleeding out, slow, sluggish. She turned to Brittany and said, “I’m leaving. You have a ride home?”

Brittany nodded, waving her hand and fluttering her fingers. She seemed too far gone to decide if she had a ride home, but Blue glanced at Brittany’s friend—Andrea?—and Andrea nodded. Blue, glad she didn’t have to shepherd anyone home, walked around the edge of the couch, room going just a little hazy. Her anger and unease from before had started to melt, a little; she probably shouldn’t have drained her cup so quickly. She started to feel far away, looking around the room now, a little lazy, eyelids heavier than they were before. She could feel the corners of her mouth turning up involuntarily, her eyes blinking slow, breathing steady and deep through her nose.

Her eyes slowly traveling around the room, they lighted on Kavinsky who was now sitting up, listening to Skov at her ear. Kavinsky flicked her eyes over to Blue; they made eye contact. Blue tried to school her expression into casual nonchalance; she wasn’t sure if she pulled it off. She couldn’t tell. She was too fuzzy.

Kavinsky, though, just stared.

Kavinsky’s eyes were so dark, she thought, too dark. Blue's skin started heating up, her clothes felt too close, and she could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. Alcohol or not, she started to feel uncomfortable. She stood by the arm of the couch, gripping it with one hand, the fabric coarse against her fingertips. She had to get out of here. Steadying herself with a breath and a moment, she turned around and walked toward the edge of the house. She sat on the edge of the unfinished porch, then dropped to the dirt below. Her bike, still leaning against its kickstand, waited for her, shoddy and safe.

Weaving a little, reflectors flashing on the streetlights, she pedaled home.

- 

A little over a week later, Blue woke, rolled out of bed, hair a rat’s nest and pajamas fit for nothing so much as surviving another ice age, and fought Orla for the shower—”Aha!” she yelled when the phone rang. “Go get that! It’s probably yours.” Orla, having lost the battle for the shower, retreated less than gracious to the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room to take what, Blue hoped, would be a very long call.

After her shower—hair clipped back, skirt and leggings appropriately layered, tanks and tees and more tanks slashed apart and laid over each other—she ate a yogurt from the fridge and trudged out to get her bike from its spot against the side of the house. She stopped on the stoop and stared.

A car sat in the driveway. A new car. A very shiny new car.

“Mom!” she yelled. “Whose car is this?”

Maura was, for a psychic, very unhelpful. She came to the door to look, resting her chin on the top of Blue’s head. “Well, I don’t know. It wasn’t there last night. Is it yours?”

Blue twisted around to look at her, dislodging Maura’s chin in the process. “What do you mean, is it mine? You know I don’t have a car.”

Maura shrugged. “It just feels like it might be yours.”

“Calla!” Blue yelled again, voice rising on the second syllable. “Can you please come touch this car?”

Calla, in turn, yelled back. “No!”

Grumbling, Blue walked around the car, peered in the windows, and kicked at the tire before stepping back fast, afraid that the car alarm would go off. It didn’t. A single key sat in the cupholder next to the front seat, and she could only guess that the doors would be unlocked. She didn’t try them to find out.

At school, Blue slogged through her classes—AP English, Bio, Pre-Calc, Art, lunch, god she wished she had a free period, Spanish III, European Hist, and, worst of all, Gym—before heading to her bike, neatly locked to the bike rack.

At the edge of the parking lot, sitting cross-legged on top of her shiny, white Mitsubishi—looking like someone’s bad dream—sat Kavinsky. Blue couldn’t make out the details of what she was wearing, but she’d seen her here often enough that she could guess: a white beater with the sides cut out, black bra showing both through the thin material at the front and the cut-out sides of her tank, baggy jeans tucked messy into combat boots. Slouchy beanie, white-rimmed sunglasses, three rings in her right ear and two in her left. A stud through her tongue, a cigarette dangling between her fingers. Blue knew she was there to pass small, clear baggies to students; she’d relocate to the deserted bleachers soon enough, but for now, Blue guessed, she wanted to be seen.

Kavinsky looked in her direction from across the parking lot, held two fingers up to her forehead, and saluted, like she’d been waiting there for someone—weird. Blue didn’t like it; she imagined Kavinsky’s dark eyes, feeling too much like the other night. Unlocking her bike from the rack, Blue ignored Kavinsky and pedaled out of the parking lot, standing to go that much faster.

When Blue got home, the strange car was still in the parking lot. It had blocked in two other Fox Way cars that morning, but Blue’s aunties and cousins, doubtless in a hurry to get to work, had backed through the grass to bypass the nuisance. Nobody, then, had claimed it.

Blue leaned her bike against the house and went inside to grab another yogurt and start her homework. She had a little over an hour before her shift at Nino’s was due to start, and she had math homework to do, finals coming up, and the SAT to prepare for. She pulled out her notebook and her pre-calc textbook, flipped to the right page, and stared at the first problem.

It stared back at her, and neither of them understood each other.

Abruptly, Blue closed her textbook. Instead, she rooted around the stack of books by her desk to find her SAT study prep book, due back at the library—ah, shit—tomorrow. The soft-edged spine had cracked in a dozen places, well-loved or more likely well-used by various juniors passing through the halls of the public school who were funneled into the library in search of resources. Half the pages had corners turned down and dog-eared, despite library etiquette, and the plasticky cover had unknown detritus stuck to it in several places. Ah, well.

She flipped halfway through the vocab section of the book, index cards in hand to copy down words and definitions she didn’t know.

_**insouciance** _

_noun_

_casual lack of concern; indifference._

_"an impression of boyish insouciance"_

_synonyms: nonchalance, unconcern, indifference, heedlessness, calm, equanimity, composure, ease, airiness_

_Insouciance_ was something, she thought, that belonged to raven girls, not to regular old Henrietta citizens. She sighed and copied down a few more words before shuffling the cards to the corner of her desk and heading back to her bike.

The car was still outside.

Later at Nino’s, her friends were—predictably—already gathered at a table. It was early for dinner, but this was the place to be. Gansey had her journal open in front of her, but instead they were examining Ronan’s latest scrape, all up the side of her arm. She’d been building ramps again, no doubt, or squeezing through fences to trespass on private property or...Blue didn’t know what she got up to. Nothing good.

“Blue, look at Ronan’s arm. Just real quick.” Gansey grabbed Ronan’s arm to hold up; Ronan looked very proud of her missing skin.

“No way. I’m good.” Blue exchanged a look with Adam before taking their order, the usual—for Gansey, a multigrain veggie calzone; for Ronan, a chicken bacon ranch personal pizza that sounded horrific to Blue, but then again a lot about Ronan sounded horrific to Blue; for Adam, a small basket of garlic fries that would serve as her meal; for Noah, who may have appeared specifically because Blue was there, nothing. Blue delivered the slip to the kitchen and, for the next two hours, settled into established monotony, refilling parmesan containers and red pepper shakers, topping off drinks, wiping down plastic black-checked tablecloths, taking orders.

And then, Kavinsky walked in.

She was flanked by her usual pack of dogs sans Skov who was probably off burning down an orphanage somewhere. She bypassed the hostess station and headed for Gansey’s table, stopping in front of Ronan. Ronan went stiff, and Blue rolled her eyes. Ronan tried so hard to pretend that nothing mattered to her but any idiot could pinpoint exactly the things that did. In this case, that thing was Kavinsky.

Kavinsky had switched her beanie for a snapback, bill flat and shadowing her eyes. Whatever conversation she’d started with Ronan finished a moment later; she chose a table on the opposite side of the row, still in Blue’s section but with plenty of breathing space between them.

Blue headed over. “What can I get you?”

Kavinsky tilted her hat up her forehead for a clearer look at Blue, leaning forward, both elbows on the table to clasp her hands together in front of her mouth like a prayer. Her eyes were hollow, cheekbones sharp; her face looked like a skull. Her eyes traveled from the tips of Blue’s boots—Goodwill, five bucks—up to meet her eyes. “Was that your bike outside?”

“Yes.”

“You know, you shouldn’t be pedaling home so late at night. You ever need a ride, you let me know.” She smiled, eyes hooded, close-mouthed, lips turned down at the corners. Blue wasn’t sure how she smiled like that, in what would look like a frown on anyone else.

“Wow, thanks, but I’m going to pass.” Blue was decidedly uncomfortable with this conversation, but this job dictated that she be polite, no matter how much she and the rest of the staff bemoaned it.

Kavinsky hadn’t stopped smiling—did it count as a smile if it looked so dangerous?—but now she leaned back in the booth. “We’ll take a large pepperoni pizza.”

“Coming right up.” Blue turned on her heels and booked it to the kitchen.

Everything about Kavinsky felt dangerous to Blue, starting with that smile. Not personally threatening, not really, sharp-edged comment about pedaling home aside, but like she was a black hole and Blue would get sucked in if she got too close. She’d noticed today through the side of Kavinsky’s butchered beater that she had a tattoo across her ribs, something Cyrillic, four lines long. It wrapped around and disappeared under her poor excuse for a shirt; Blue’s pulse had stuttered.

She put in the slip and, twelve minutes later, delivered the pizza to their table; they paid her no mind, engrossed in some video on Proko’s phone. As she was leaving, Blue, out of the corner of her eye, saw Kavinsky look up. She didn’t turn to see what she was looking at.

She retreated to the kitchen and crossed her arms on the counter for a moment, feeling like she’d jogged across a football field—familiar thanks to her sadist of a gym teacher. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, but she could feel the adrenaline, feel her skin buzzing, her fingers starting to twitch, just a bit, just enough for her to notice.

She breathed deep and headed to Gansey’s table to refill drinks; Adam and Gansey both narrowed their eyes at her, while Ronan chose to narrow her eyes in Kavinsky’s direction—typical. Noah patted her hand and then reached up to pat her hair, eyes wide and, it seemed, understanding. Blue’s hair was spikier than usual this evening, thanks to the wind outside. On her pedal to work, she’d lost three of her hair clips, sacrificed to Virginia’s erstwhile weather, and she didn’t have spares to corral her hair.

Blue smiled at her, finished pouring, and checked on the rest of her tables.

Kavinsky’s crew had gone already. They’d been there long enough to scarf down the whole pizza—sans half the crust—and scatter crumbs all over both benches while stiffing her on her tip— _typical_. Nestled on a pile of napkins, though, lay a keychain with a single key attached. Blue picked it up; it was heavy in her hand, heavier than it seemed like it should be. The clip at the top, burnished silver, was followed by a leather band with a dragon skull emblem on top; the leather was threaded through with a ring which, in turn, dangled three separate, swinging talons. The key itself, also swinging from the ring, was a car key but otherwise nondescript. A car key. Blue shook her head and pocketed it, intending to turn in to Nino’s lost and found; the keychain definitely looked like it belonged to Kavinsky or her pack but Blue would prefer not to return it personally.

Her shift ended, she pedaled home, wheeling past the horrible car still sitting outside her house—safe and sound, thanks!—and undressed, tossing her skirt, leggings, and various shirts into the hamper. The skirt thunked against the plastic; Blue reached in and pulled it out, patting down the various pockets she’d sewn into the thing.

The keychain. She hadn’t turned in the keychain.

- 

School the next day was long, boring, a little lonely. She hadn’t noticed so much before she met Gansey and company; now, she was slowly getting used to being surrounded by other people, laughing and joking and clasping hands, swinging arms around each other. As school let out, she started thinking about her evening: no Nino’s tonight, no dog-walking, so she’d have time to meet up with her friends, maybe hunt ley lines with them. Deep in thought, she unlocked her bike and almost didn’t notice what seemed like the entire student body staring in her direction.

This was, of course, because Kavinsky was standing on top of her car, yelling.

“Blue! Blue Sargent! Hey! Blue!” She prolonged the single-syllable name, turning it into two syllables or three or a dozen. “Bitch, don’t make me come over there!”

Blue stiffened at that. She turned slowly to look at Kavinsky who raised her arms, waving her snapback in one hand, short hair spiked up like she’d run both hands through it furiously. “Finally! Get over here.”

Instead, Blue got on her bike and headed in the opposite direction.

She heard Kavinsky yell again, the sound of it smudgy and more unclear the farther she went. She cut up through the park, past the public library—a longer ride home but blessedly free of cars—and through a series of suburban walking trails that Kavinsky wouldn’t be able to follow. Bitch! Who was Kavinsky to call her a bitch anyway?

She hit the end of the trail and hung a left and then a right to arrive at her street. Suddenly, all instinct, she drew up fast, swerved, left muddy tire tracks in the sidewalk plot. Directly in front of her was a white Mitsubishi. Kavinsky swung open her door and climbed out, leaned against the side, and smiled at her.

“Hey, lady.” She said _lady_ like she’d said _bitch_ earlier. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

“Avoiding,” Blue air-quoted, condescension dripping, “implies I’ve ever not-avoided you before. And, by the way, don’t call me a bitch.”

Kavinsky laughed, tipped her head to the side, incisors sharp. “Sorry, force of habit.”

She didn’t look sorry to Blue. “Do you need something? Actually, you know what? I don’t care. Why are you following me home?”

“Babe, come on. I wanted to talk to you,” Kavinsky quirked a brow, smile still turning down the corners of lips, “and you were so distant last night. How’s a girl supposed to get your attention?”

Blue gritted her teeth. _Babe_ wasn’t much better; it rankled, ill-fitting and itchy. “You didn’t even—leave—me—a—tip.”

“Check yourself, sweetheart. You sure that’s true?”

Blue remembered the keychain she’d found on the table and later pulled out of her pocket. It sat now on her desk at home next to a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes she was planning on repurposing into wall art—something with lily pads maybe. She crossed her arms and tried to look like she wasn’t bewildered. Not easy to do at the moment.

“You can have your keychain back. Or, if you left it on purpose, you can have it back anyway. Bin items fresh from Hot Topic don’t count as a tip.”

“No, please, keep it. My gift to you, babe. I know that key sure looked like it belonged to a great ride.”

 _What?_ It clicked then, and Blue gaped, closed her mouth, and then closed her eyes. She breathed out, slowly, and then looked at Kavinsky. “You have got to be kidding me. You left that car.” The pitch of her voice started to rise. “Did you buy it?” Still higher. “Did you steal it?” Blue’s fury, now a projectile, broke the sound barrier.

Kavinsky laughed again. “No and—look, it doesn’t have a previous owner. You should keep it. Suits you. Blue in a blue car.” She pushed herself off the side of the car and drummed her fingers along the roof, got inside, and rolled down the window. “See you on the streets.”

She drove off. Blue yelled after her and waved her arms in the air, but Kavinsky didn’t turn around.

Blue whipped her head around and fumed. A car! Where did Kavinsky get off, looking at her and thinking she needed a car! She was right, or would be soon—Blue couldn’t afford a car, and college was looming—but that wasn’t the point. The point—Blue wrenched her bike up from the grass where she’d laid it gracelessly—the point—

The _point_ was that there was a useless car in her driveway, and her aunties would probably soon assemble en masse to move it bodily if she didn't move it first. She arrived home and stomped up the stairs, throwing her backpack on the bed and stomping back down. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Maura watching her. She opened the car door, unlocked—Blue was lucky it hadn’t been stolen, with the key still sitting in the cupholder, although maybe she was distinctly unlucky it hadn’t been stolen—slid in, jammed the key in the ignition, and twisted.

Oh.

The engine roared, loud, tingling through Blue’s nerves. It quieted to a steady purr, and she grabbed the wheel, fingers wrapped around and touching her palms. She could feel it rumbling through her whole body, through the soles of her shoes, the backs of her thighs, the heels of her hands. Fingers unsteady, she reached over to touch the inside of the door. That vibrated too, stronger than the steering wheel, the tips of her fingers going numb with it. She pressed the brake, that too shaking, that too rumbling stronger than the floor of the car. It felt—it felt—

It felt exhilarating.

This wasn’t like Gansey’s car, always a hope away from an impromptu repair off the side of the road. When Gansey’s car roared to life, it hit Blue like a blast all at once. Here, with this car, it wound its way through skin and muscle and bone, snaking along her nerves, lighting them up one by one.

She took a moment to breathe before putting the car in reverse and adjusting her mirrors. It wasn’t so much that Blue was bad at driving—she was responsible and careful and truly excellent at yielding—but rather that she didn’t have a lot of practice. Too nervous, she couldn’t sink into it the way Gansey and Ronan seemed to; their driving seemed to be an afterthought, secondary to any adventures occurring inside the car or out. Blue didn’t know how to be like that, casual, unaware of her roaring engine and the way she hurtled down the street. So now, she let out the brake slow, avoiding the gas, allowing the overpowered car to do the work for her. She backed up, minding the dip of the driveway, pausing before backing into the road, steering around the trashcans clustered at the curb. Pulling forward, she parked in front of the house and turned off the car, fastest she’d moved so far. Silence. Nothing thrummed except her nerves, her pulse, aftershocks from the rumble of the engine.

She got out of the car after a moment, ran her fingers along the smooth, spotless paint on the side. Her eyes caught on the car logo around the back, blue with silver starbursts. The back was missing the make and model, unfortunate for Blue because she didn’t know much about cars; she knew Kavinsky drove a Mitsubishi, that Ronan drove a BMW, that Gansey drove a Camaro—because Ronan wouldn’t shut up about any of them—but that was about it. She didn’t recognize this logo—not many of them in Henrietta, maybe, or more likely because Blue identified cars primarily by their color and, practical, if they still had brake lights intact. This car was a horrifying shade of electric blue; like a crash, you couldn’t look away. The brake lights were indeed intact, sitting below a particularly obnoxious spoiler. Not as bad as Kavinsky’s at least.

Kavinsky. Blue was starting to get angry again, the tips of her ears heating up, her fingers clenching. The spoiler was huge, the rims were gold—gold!—and the sides hung down too low, triple-dog-daring any old speed bump to take them off. Blue kicked at tire savagely, second time in as many days. She willed the alarm to go off—it didn’t—so she took herself and her probably-illicit car key back inside the house.

Maura stood at the base of the stairs, arms loosely crossed, with Calla by her side, arms less loosely crossed. Blue looked at both of them, watched them look at each other, and stomped upstairs.

- 

After school the next day, Blue headed to the back of the building instead of the parking lot at the front. That morning, she’d decided that discretion was the better part of valor, or the best offense was a good defense, or some other platitude that allowed her to avoid Kavinsky’s smug, punchable, angular face with all those cheekbones and her strong jaw and her—

She stopped to dig her toe under a clump of grass uprooted by the football team, frustrated. She wasn’t even sure Kavinsky would be there in the parking lot today, although she’d been lurking the past few days. ”Coincidence,” Blue muttered, habit, because it wasn’t. Usually, she wasn’t one to avoid her problems, preferring to stare them down, but she had a feeling that she wouldn’t be able to solve her Kavinsky problem in the usual way.

Her bike, which she’d bravely locked up in the staff lot, was—miraculously—still there.

After her tutoring shift, she met Adam in the parking lot of Monmouth, leaning bikes to building. On the ride over, her front tire had felt a little flat, so she hoped it would hold out until she got home.

As it turned out, Gansey decided—in the way only Gansey could—that the group could use some downtime. “Fellowship,” Gansey said wisely. “You know. Communion.” Ronan, who had been drinking for some time—surreptitiously out of a water bottle while Gansey pretended not to notice—started to recite an Our Father before Adam kicked her in the shin. And so, Gansey was interested in learning the rules to Pinochle, Ronan was interested in drinking, and Noah was interested in tossing candy at Ronan while she drank; luckily these various pursuits weren’t at odds with each other. Gansey googled “pinochle five people” and unraveled the twisted knot of rules with Gansey-like precision into a series of neat, straight strings that Adam and Blue—newcomers to the fine art of card games for the middle aged—could understand.

Blue, after a few hands, decided that Pinochle wasn’t so bad, primarily because Ronan seemed to be having a great time as she slowly approached inebriation. Blue knew that Gansey didn’t approve, but it was easy enough to draw out this peaceful happiness as long as possible.

Adam, begging out after six hands and citing an early shift and two papers, headed out to her bike with Blue on her heels. The light above Monmouth’s double doors buzzed, yellowing and faded, crane flies circling. Blue circled her bike under the light to take a look at her tire; she should have taken care of it right away because now it was completely flat.

Adam paused. “Do you think Gansey has a pump? It might last you until you get home.”

They looked at each other for a beat and then laughed, Blue feeling lighter than she had for the past couple weeks. Of course Gansey wouldn’t have a bike pump; she could barely keep up with the Camaro, much less a bike she didn’t own. Ronan wouldn’t have one either, generally eschewing transportation that didn’t have four wheels and eight cylinders.

“You go ahead. I’ll just see if one of them can give me a ride home. We probably have a tire pump in the house...somewhere.”

“If you don’t, I do. Just let me know.”

Blue smiled at her and saluted. Adam wheeled out of the parking lot, and Blue trudged back upstairs.

Gansey, of course, agreed to drive Blue home although the bike would have to stay at Monmouth; she wasn’t willing to dismantle the thing just to get it home. Ronan was in no shape to be driving anywhere, but she was in plenty of shape for Gansey to drive her, probably thrilled at the opportunity to goad Gansey into a streetrace. Noah, of course, would not participate in any goading and would probably wring her hands for the duration of any mischief, but she wanted to come too.

Eight minutes and six stop signs later, they heard Kavinsky’s car pull up next to them. The sound of the engine wasn’t so much distinctive as were the voices whooping and hollering through the open windows, pitched high enough to cut through the rumble of both cars. Ronan, who had been slumped against the side in the backseat, sat up straight. Pointing like a hound dog, Blue thought.

“Gansey, please.” Ronan sounded desperate.

“No way. Not happening. She’s a dirtbag.”

Kavinsky looked in their direction before lowering her shades and staring right at Blue; she stared back. Kavinsky grinned—tongue at the corner of her mouth, stud catching the light—before throwing her head back, laughing, and yelling, “Lady!”

 _Lady_ still sounded like _bitch_ , but Blue was beginning to suspect most things did.

Blue, yanking her head front, rolled up her window. “She’s not a dirtbag. She’s an asshole.”

Gansey turned to look at her, and she could feel Ronan and Noah staring at the back of her head. Putting both hands on the seatbacks in front of her, Ronan pulled herself forward and twisted to look at Gansey.

“Gansey, I’m telling you—”

“No.”

The light turned green, and Gansey didn’t move. Kavinsky, clearly hoping to have some fun with Blue and maybe with Ronan—and just as clearly disappointed—revved her engine once, twice, three times, and then drove off. Blue slumped against the front seat in time with Ronan who slumped against the back. She took a peak at Gansey’s face; she looked a little bit how Blue felt, had felt for the past two weeks. Bewildered.

Gansey dropped her at home, and Blue walked up to the porch, turning to wave them off from where they were waiting in the driveway. Gansey backed out, pausing next to the horrible blue car still in front of the house. Ronan sat up again. Blue saw them look at each other, then at the car, and then back at her. Ronan narrowed her eyes.

Blue quirked her eyebrow in a question, even though they wouldn’t be able to make it out at this distance, and then she decided it was a question she’d prefer not to ask. She didn’t want to know what exactly Ronan thought about that car, so instead she turned and went inside.


	2. Chapter 2

Blue was late. Her alarm hadn’t gone off, Orla had beaten her to the shower, Jimi was smudging the entire house sans Blue’s room “because you were sleeping,” the light above the kitchen table had gone out again, and—worst of all—the fridge was completely empty of yogurt.

And so, when she walked outside and saw Kavinsky parked behind the blue abomination, she huffed once and turned the corner of the house toward Orla’s bike, on temporary loan and which she would have to adjust. It would be a stretch even if the seat were a Blue-appropriate height. Kavinsky honked. Blue huffed louder and rolled her eyes, luxurious, perfectly aware that Kavinsky could neither see nor hear her. 

She heard a car door slam. A moment later, Kavinsky walked up beside her, hands in her pockets, toothpick dangling out of the corner of her mouth. A toothpick! Blue straightened up from where she was bent over the bike, still pulling at the catch to loosen the seat. 

“Hey, lady.”

Blue rolled her eyes a third time. She was beginning to get a headache. She could hear Calla’s voice in her head— _Blue, you keep rolling them, they’ll stay that way_.

“You need a ride?”

Blue finally released the seat catch and pushed the seat down viciously. “No thank you.”

Kavinsky smiled, swirling the toothpick from one side of her mouth to the other. “You sure? It’s, what, a ten-minute bike ride? You’re going to miss your homeroom.”

Blue, abandoning the seat, turned to face her. “Why aren’t you at school? Are raven girls exempt from classes now?” She resisted the urge to kick the bike tire; it was a near thing. She’d had enough of kicking tires over the past few weeks, and anyway, kicking it would give too much away; she certainly didn’t want to give anything to Kavinsky.

“Raven girls! Babe, that’s charming. Look, that bike,” she clicked her tongue, “that bike is huge on you. I promise, I’ll get you to school safe and sound.” Blue noticed that she hadn’t answered the question and that she was considering getting into a car with Kavinsky of all people, but she really didn’t want to be late.

Blue nodded and, as she followed Kavinsky down to her car, said, “I would like to be clear in this situation. This is a special circumstance that I didn’t anticipate, and I don’t appreciate you showing up out of—out of nowhere.” She’d nearly said “out of the blue” but she didn’t appreciate other people using such pejoratives, and she wasn’t about to use one herself.

Kavinsky, still looking pleased as punch, opened the door for her. “Sure thing. One time deal. No problem.”

Blue masterfully kept herself from rolling her eyes for a fourth time. “Chivalry isn’t dead yet.”

Kavinsky pounded the roof and swung open the driver’s side door. “Not for _ladies_ like you and me.” Blue closed her eyes.

Blue stayed silent during the trip, thankful it would only take five minutes. Maybe less. Probably less, since this was Kavinsky in Kavinsky’s car traversing Kavinsky’s kingdom. Blue was too used to Gansey’s driving—slow and cautious, rarely reckless, despite the workhorse she drove. Kavinsky drove like a devil—slow and cautious weren’t in her vocabulary. Blue thanked her lucky stars when they pulled in the parking lot, glad she hadn’t died in a fiery wreck—or from secondhand smoke—or from Kavinsky making any crass comments.

Blue climbed out of the car and circled to the driver’s side, determined to be polite. “Thanks. For the ride.”

“Anytime, babe. Anytime. Hey, I have something for you.” Kavinsky twisted around in her seat, rooted around in the back, and surfaced with a large, soft-cover book. She tossed it out her window into Blue’s arms. _The Official SAT Study Guide_ , it said in big bold letters.

Blue stiffened. “What’s this for?”

“It’s for you. You’re doing SATs in a few months, right? Same for us ‘raven girls.’” Kavinsky curled her fingers around the words. She smiled, her mouth slanted down. “Turns out, Henrietta trash and Aglionby trash both shit in the same place.” 

Glaring, Blue tossed the book back in the open window. “I don't need that. ‘Henrietta trash,’” this time, it was Blue’s turn for air quotes, “makes do with the public library, which I guess you wouldn’t know about.”

“No need to make this ugly, lady.”

Blue’s lips thinned. “I don’t need it. Feel free to donate it to the library.”

“Yeah, no, I’m not doing that.” Kavinsky dropped the book back out the window. It thudded gracelessly to the pavement, landing half-open by Blue’s feet. “Hey, maybe I’ll see you later,” she said.

At this point, Blue didn’t doubt it. Torn between leaving the book there on the pavement to spite Kavinsky—those books weren’t expensive, she’d learned after searching for them online, but they were more expensive than her Nino’s budget would allow when a serviceable library copy would do—and taking it with her to donate, she took a moment to swallow her pride. She bent down to pick it up and zipped it into her backpack with the rest of her textbooks.

Kavinsky waited in the parking lot until Blue hit the double doors into the school and turned around; she then spit the toothpick onto the pavement, made a gesture with her fingers and tongue that left little room for interpretation, and peeled out of the lot. Blue, breathing deep, felt like thunking her head against the metal doors; she refrained.

Later, as the huge clock in the gym ticked closer to 2:45, Blue knew the bell would ring—welcome—and that she’d have to face the school parking lot and whatever delinquents it might contain that day—less welcome. If the lot did indeed contain a certain delinquent, she knew her ears would heat up, the hair on the back of her neck would prickle, how her arms would goosebump; she wasn’t looking forward to it. She’d rather avoid it like she had yesterday but her family motto—the Sargents had many family mottos, carefully curated and tended and always chosen specially by a psychic for that week’s particular situation—wouldn’t let her. _Your spine isn’t just for holding your body up, Blue. Put it to good use._

Blue, still in gym clothes and facing a long walk home, pinned her hair back up in the bathroom mirror and took a deep breath. She mimicked Gansey, the particular pitch of her voice and the way she rolled her vowels: “Excelsior.”

Sure enough, Kavinsky was waiting for her, this time just outside the double doors. She’d apparently decided not to wait on the roof of her car just like Blue had decided not to exit through the back of the school. She could hear Maura’s voice, doubtless quoting someone else— _A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied_ —and then Calla pitching in right after— _A good compromise is when everyone’s royally pissed._ Blue wasn’t pissed, but her ears were getting hot, and she was very dissatisfied about that.

Kavinsky—backwards snapback, rings through her ears switched for twinkling studs, black beater, gray sweats with white stripes down the sides, brand-name sneakers—was leaning against a column, one knee bent with foot flat against the brick. She looked trashy, Blue thought, before glancing down at her own t-shirt and looking back up. Trashy and expensive. Were those diamonds?

“Need a ride?” She looked— _insouciant_. One point for crappy library books, zero points for Kavinsky’s copy. She’d brought the book to the school librarian earlier that day, saying she had accidentally ordered an extra and couldn't return it. The librarian had accepted it, thanked her, and dismissed her without asking any questions; Blue had been grateful.

“The school library appreciated your SAT book.” Blue felt like pointing this out, like she needed to confirm to Kavinsky that she wasn’t going to use that book. “You should try doing good deeds more often.”

“You know me, I’m a goddamn charitable individual.” Kavinsky continued to lean against the brick wall, like she was waiting for something.

“You’re charitable, and the school is what? A charity case?” Blue thought, _Am I a charity case?_ but she certainly wasn’t going to ask Kavinsky.

“I just call them like I see them. A straight-shooter and all.” The corner of Kavinsky’s mouth twitched up like she was sharing a joke with Blue. Blue didn’t want to think about what it meant.

Kavinsky levered herself off the wall. “Look, do you need a ride?”

Blue bristled. “I do not. I said one time, and I meant it.” She started walking. As she turned the corner, she glanced back at Kavinsky who had leaned back against the pillar again. She’d twisted her hat around so that she could rest her head against the brick, gaze pointed up, and she had one wrist caught in her opposite hand, resting against her sweats. 

Blue faced forward and kept walking. No need to dwell. 

When she got home, she arranged to have Adam fix her bike, and it occurred to her that this would be simpler if both she and Adam had cell phones. It also occurred to her that this would be simpler if she accepted rides everywhere from a certain persistent reprobate, and then she reconsidered: logistically simpler, harder on her pride.

-

The next morning, Blue was not late for school. She trotted out the front door early, accounting for the extra time it would take her to get to school on the bicycle made for giants, grabbing the bike from the side of the house, and wheeling it down toward the street. Abruptly, she stopped in her tracks. 

Kavinsky was waiting, leaning against her Mitsubishi, which was parked behind the blue demon car. Blue felt like shaking her cane at her and yelling at her to get off the Sargent lawn; she didn’t have a cane but she did have a superb yelling voice.

“Get off my lawn!”

Blue’s primary problem right now was not that Kavinsky was on her lawn but rather that all this attention was—flattering. She wasn’t proud of it, but she couldn’t help it. She felt like some kind of cautionary tale, feeling flattered by someone who was—by all accounts—a menace, but she also knew that Kavinsky was, well—Blue’s pulse sped up a bit when she looked at her. She knew that Kavinsky was trouble, that Blue hadn’t been lying when she told Gansey that Kavinsky was an asshole, that Gansey wasn’t wrong when she said Kavinsky was a dirtbag. Kavinsky was all of those things and yet, here she was, standing outside Blue’s house next to two horrible cars, and Blue couldn’t quite muster up what she felt was the appropriate amount of frustration. She could try though; she could always try.

Kavinsky held up her hands, universal sign for peace, and stepped onto the lawn rather than retreating. Blue resisted the urge to put her hands on her hips.

Kavinsky walked closer. “I’m not going to ask if you need a ride. Look, I just came to give you this.” She dug around in her pocket, producing a single, black flash drive. 

Blue put one hand on her hip after all, the other still on the bike. “What’s on it?”

“Come on, that would ruin the surprise.”

Blue started to walk past her. 

“Okay, okay, look,” Kavinsky followed after her. “I’m going to leave it there on your porch, okay? If you look, you look, and if you don’t, you don’t.”

Blue kept going, not saying a word. She reached the street.

“Fine!” Kavinsky yelled, back on the front lawn, which, Blue noted, she was still standing on. “Fine! Whatever!”

Blue got on her bike, pedaling in the direction of the school. She could hear the sound of a boot hitting a car; that would be Kavinsky, although it was anyone’s guess which car she was kicking. She told herself that she didn’t much care.

She thought about it all day though. She repeated to herself that she didn’t care, she really didn’t! But she thought about it when she turned in her math homework, when she got a new paper assignment in history, when she doodled in her notebook at lunch, when she served the volleyball in gym. She was curious about the contents of the flash drive, about Kavinsky’s attitude when Blue had blown her off the day before, about her kicking the side of a car this morning, about the party weeks ago. She never should have gone to that stupid party. This had all started then, whatever this was, this confusing song and dance that they seemed to be locked in.

After school, after her pedal home, she found the flash drive at the bottom of an empty flower pot on the front porch. Kavinsky had left it there after all. She picked it up and pounded upstairs, opening her laptop. She stared at it in her hand for a moment, unsure about what she would find—she desperately hoped it wasn’t porn—before inserting it into the slot and opening a folder titled _B L U E_.

The folder contained two files: _dontdelete.pdf_ and _pleaseread.txt_. So, Kavinsky wasn’t the type to logically name her files, Blue thought. In retrospect, it made sense. She opened the text file first.

_dont get your panties in a wad. its torrented. stick it to the man or whatever_

This, Blue thought, made no sense. She opened the PDF.

_The Official SAT Study Guide_ , the cover read. Blue scrolled through it; the book was published this year, unlike the library copy, exactly like the hardcopy Kavinsky had given her earlier. She searched the PDF for _insouciant_. It took a few seconds, but there it was. She closed her eyes. “Insouciant,” she recited, “lacking concern, indifferent.” She opened her eyes again, looking at the definition. She was right about the definition, but—

She thought about this flash drive and the book on it. It didn’t seem to demonstrate indifference.

Later, Blue thought in frustration that she did not have the time to be dealing with Kavinsky at Nino’s; Friday nights were no joke, and tonight was no exception. And yet, here they both were, Kavinsky trying to make too much eye contact and Blue trying even harder to avoid it. Realistically, Blue knew, Kavinsky was finally behaving herself, and it surprised her; Kavinsky sat alone in a booth with her back against the wall, legs stretched out in front of her on the bench and crossed at the ankles, picking at her pizza, scrolling through her phone, and glancing at Blue too often. She’d been there since before Blue’s shift, and she didn’t look like she would be leaving soon. Blue expected a tip this time and told her so when she refilled her water.

“If you’re keeping that booth, I expect adequate compensation.”

Kavinsky saluted, flicking two fingers out from her temple, but didn’t say anything back. Weird. It wasn’t like her to stay quiet. 

The next time Blue made her rounds, she asked, “So, where’s your friends? They’re usually, you know,” Blue gestured with one hand, careful not to slosh her pitcher in the other, “orbiting.”

Kavinsky shrugged. “Partying, probably. Hey, when do you get off?”

Blue hesitated and then said, “Eight.” 

Kavinsky checked her phone for the time. Blue knew it was getting close; the last time she’d looked at the clock in the kitchen, it had been a little after 7:30, although the crowd hadn’t thinned yet and wasn’t likely to until well after Blue’s shift had ended.

Blue, pausing again, asked, “Do you need the check?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Blue brought the check and took Kavinsky’s card to swipe at the register. She brought the slip and card back to Kavinsky, who scrawled her name and—good lord—an actual tip. Blue resisted the temptation to look at the number while Kavinsky was sitting right there, but she said, all professionalism, “Thanks. Have a good evening.”

Kavinsky smiled faintly, just one corner of her mouth turning up. Blue took the slip back to the register to punch in the tip; when she turned back to Kavinsky, she’d gone. Blue returned to the table where she discovered a small pile of hair clips sitting on a clean pile of napkins—keychain déjà vu. They were an eclectic bunch: some tie-dye-patterned, a matching pair round in the shapes of peace signs, a few with glittery flowers on the end, one completely white with the suggestion of a dragon swirled in gray on the top. Blue remembered the last time Kavinsky had been at Nino’s, when Blue’s hair stuck up every which way, victim of the wind. These were clearly meant for her; like the flash drive, this was some kind of peace offering that Blue didn’t quite understand, an act of contrition rather than another notch in the bedpost of charity. She gathered them up, two handfuls, and slid them into the pockets of her jeans.

She half-expected the white Mitsubishi to be waiting outside Nino’s when she walked to her bike, but it was conspicuously absent. Blue wished that it was there—a novel feeling—so she could ask Kavinsky about the hair clips, about the car, about the party. She rode home alone.

-

Blue didn’t see Kavinsky for a few days but as those days bled into a few more, into a week, into two weeks, she started to wonder, and then she started to worry. It wasn’t like Kavinsky and her pack were regulars at Nino’s—tending to frequent establishments less reputable—but after the party and a week of what seemed to Blue like an intense, adolescent courtship, she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t ask Ronan where they were either; while Ronan might know, she also might, for all her underdeveloped emotional awareness, read something about Kavinsky from Blue’s face, and Blue couldn’t have that.

And so, all she could do was sit and spin.

She studied for finals and walked her dogs and planted her flowers and took extra shifts at Nino’s. She studied for the SATs, studiously not thinking about the origin of her prep book, and pinned her hair every morning, nearly ignoring the strange, colorful clips on her dresser. She and her friends buried Noah, bittersweet—glad to have their friend back as much as they could. She took her finals and ended the school year not with a bang but with a whimper, glad enough to be finished anyway. She smiled at her customers and laughed with Gansey and the others and tried to pretend she didn’t see the glances they occasionally tossed between one another while they thought she wasn’t looking. She certainly didn’t think she was acting any differently.

Finally, two weeks later, Kavinsky and her pack walked in to Nino’s partway through Blue’s shift and left half an hour later, long enough to order quickly, eat quickly, and exit quickly, long enough for Blue to notice a bruise, a yellow patch of skin on Kavinsky’s cheekbone, fading to brown and disappearing under her sunglasses. It was a whirlwind, and it was confusing. Remembering their disastrous interaction at the party, she felt awkward and uncomfortable around Kavinsky’s friends, especially Skov, and still uneasy with Kavinsky herself. 

Later, after her shift, Blue retreated to the back, tossing her apron in the laundry basket and clocking out. Shrugging on her jacket, she grabbed her bag and slung it across her chest. When she walked out, Kavinsky was waiting for her.

“Lady. Long time, no see.”

Blue startled. “Oh my God. What are you doing here? I literally just saw you like two hours ago.” 

“Yeah, you know, time crawls when I’m not with you. You get my present?” Kavinsky’s eyes flicked up to Blue’s hair, snagging on a colorful clip.

Drily, Blue replied, “Yeah, your present and a tip. Wonders never cease. Where have you, you know,” Blue paused, “been?” She wasn’t sure if this was sending the wrong signal, asking after Kavinsky, but she’d long ago made a promise to herself to satisfy her curiosity whenever possible. About this, she was definitely curious.

“Jersey shore vaycay. You know me, babe. GTL or whatever.”

Not knowing what to make of that, Blue ignored it and moved on. “If you’re here to give me a ride, don’t bother. My bike won’t fit in that car of yours, and I’m not leaving it here.”

“Hey now.” Kavinsky raised her hands, nonthreatening. “I just came to see if you wanted to get dinner. Besides,” she grinned, “you know what they say about townie girls on the first date.”

Blue puffed up to her full height and lied. “I most certainly do not know what they say.”

“Uh huh,” Kavinsky said, unconvinced. “Do you want to get food here or do you not shit where you eat?”

Blue stared. Was there a right answer to that question? She was hungry though; she could feel her stomach rumbling. “First of all, this is not a date. I’m hungry, but it is not a date. But second of all, here’s fine.” 

“Fantastic. Shall we?” Kavinsky gestured with one arm and then laughed, a parody of a good Virginia gentleman.

Blue led Kavinsky through the back door and to a booth in the far corner. Kavinsky, sitting opposite Blue, pulled out the salt shaker and dumped part of its contents on the table, running her finger through the mess while Blue watched. After eyeing the pile of salt, the waitress still on shift filled their water glasses and took their order, or rather Kavinsky’s order; Kavinsky drawled, “I’ll order for us,” still playing the good Virginia gentleman. “A large pizza with onions, peppers, and mushrooms.”

Kavinsky looked at Blue. “How’d I do?”

Blue conceded that Kavinsky did a passable job, although she said, “I would have added olives.”

Kavinsky laughed, but Blue was already thinking about the check. She could hear Calla saying, sage, “It’s not a date unless you let him pay.” Blue assumed the same advice would apply in this situation.

The waitress brought out their food, and Blue took a slice while Kavinsky helped herself to three. She must have noticed Blue eying her plate skeptically because she said, “I’m a growing girl,” and smiled before taking a bite.

They finished their food, and the waitress cleared the table for them. Blue fidgeted, twisting the paper from her straw around her fingers. “I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Did you really knock out Billy Hardwick’s teeth with a baseball bat?”

Kavinsky laughed suddenly, surprised. “No! You don’t seem like someone who listens to gossip, and you’re still coming at me with this!” She paused, scooping the salt, still in the corner of the table, back into a pile in front of her before looking up coyly at Blue. “It was brass knuckles.”

Blue tried not to gape. “You’re kidding.”

“Tit for tat. He got handsy. Hey, what else do the unwashed masses say about me?”

Unwashed masses. “You know, that’s a shitty thing to say,” she said, but she continued. “Did you really burn down the old Mason barn?”

Kavinsky abandoned her pile, tucking her hands under her chin and looking at Blue, the corner of her mouth turning up. “Guilty. Big party. Lots of people to please. They wanted a bonfire, so I gave them a bonfire. You know how that goes though.”

“Do I?”

Kavinsky gestured, hand waving vaguely. “Yeah, you know how my parties get. Anyway, keep going. What else?”

Blue was thrown for a moment. “Did you really put four kids in the hospital with,” now it was Blue’s turn to gesture vaguely, “whatever it is that you cook up?”

Kavinsky sat back, arms folded across her chest, still smiling. “They should know not to mix uppers and downers. I’m not running a babysitting club. Jiang called the ambulance, the old softie.” Kavinsky said this like it was a moral failing. “It’s not a real party until someone taps out,” she crossed herself, “God love ‘em. Ok, that’s three questions. My turn.”

Cautious, Blue nodded.

“So. Psychics, huh?”

Blue was used to people not believing her family were who they said they were, and she was used to people who believed enough to get them in the front door to pay their twenty bucks. A few of those people kept believing afterwards when they saw their lucky number or received a small windfall or narrowly avoided a car accident; Kavinsky didn’t seem like she fit in any of those categories. Blue was wary.

“Yeah. I’m not though. Psychic, I mean. Everyone in my family is, but I’m not.”

Kavinsky leaned forward, no longer looking casual. She also, to Blue, didn’t look like she was about to make fun of her. “So you’re saying there’s nothing special about you.”

Blue bristled. “I didn't say that. I just said I’m not psychic.”

“Come on. Spit it out. Don’t leave a girl hanging.”

Blue fiddled with the strap of her bag next to her and then the hem of her shirt in her lap. She’d liberated the shells of pens whose ink had run out and run a piece of thread through them all before sewing the whole long string, now encased in plastic, to the bottom of her shirt. Her fingernails tapped against a repurposed pen. “Gansey says I’m like the table at Starbucks everyone wants.”

“Oh, _Gansey_ says. How very corporate of her. Starbucks!” Kavinsky laughed. “Okay, so people...want you?” She ran her fingers along her chain. “Babe, that’s a no-brainer.”

Blue flushed, hot and embarrassed. Still, she thought that Kavinsky was taking this all in stride. She didn’t look skeptical, like Blue would have suspected, and she didn’t look like she was stringing Blue along, which she also would have suspected. Maybe that’s why she said next, “That’s not what I meant. I meant that...I meant that I make other people stronger. Other people with...magic, I guess.” She paused, secret out. “My turn.”

Kavinsky nodded. “Tit for tat.”

“The car.”

Kavinsky scattered the salt again. “What about the car?”

“Come on. Where did it come from? Whose is it? And why did you leave it outside of my house?”

For the first time, Kavinsky looked hesitant, like she didn’t know what to do with her hands. She fingered the chain around her neck, then drummed her fingers along the table, then finally clasped her hands underneath and leaned forward. “You run with Ronan, right, so you know what she is?”

Blue nodded. She’d found out that Ronan—dreamed things just a couple weeks earlier. She hadn’t been aware that Kavinsky knew about Ronan, but she was realizing that Kavinsky had her fingers in a lot of pies. In Ronan’s pie, specifically; she told herself sternly that it wasn’t a euphemism.

“Yeah, so—I pulled that car from my dreams.”

Mouth open, Blue stared and then enunciated each word. “Are—you—kidding—me.”

Kavinsky smiled a little, faintly. “Nah, dude, I took it from my dreams for you. You give a girl all kinds of thoughts at night.” She looked as if she wanted to leer a little over the last bit, but it felt hollow to Blue, like Kavinsky couldn’t quite pull it off after hesitating so visibly.

“So you’re telling me you pulled a whole entire car out of your dream? Ronan can’t do that. She just comes back with weird things.”

“Ronan,” Kavinsky said, contemptuous, “has never worked at anything in her life.”

Blue almost laughed. Ironic that Kavinsky—drug dealer extraordinaire; rich, privileged raven girl; all-around bad time—was developing a superior attitude about her work ethic. It was true about Ronan though, and it was true that Kavinsky could pull a car, in one piece and running, out of nothing. “Okay, so,” Blue was having trouble finding what to say next. “Okay. So you dreamed up a car and gave it to me. Why?”

Kavinsky, with all the grace of a supplicant who had stumbled absolved from a confessional, said, “You are one cute little battery.”

_Cute? Little?_ “Battery?” Blue narrowly maintained her dignity. “You’re telling me you knew this whole time?”

Kavinsky looked more at ease now that she had the high ground again. “Yeah. So, I always go to the same place in my dream every time. Ronan probably told you about wherever it is that she goes.”

Cabeswater, Blue thought. Ronan always went to Cabeswater.

Kavinsky continued, “Last year, you came to the Fourth. I went to pull the fucking coolest firework this shitty little town had ever seen.” She laughed, “No offense. I went to a different place, though, a place I’d never seen before, and I pulled Swan in with me. Dude, that’s never happened before. I always go to the same place, and I’m always alone.”

Blue interrupted. “Wait, how do you know I was at your party? You didn’t even know who I was, and I only knew who you were because—”

“Because half your student body wishes they could afford my shit? Yeah, babe, no kidding. You know that party I threw a couple weeks ago? It happened again, and that’s because I’ve been doing some fucking Sherlock Holmes detective work trying to find you. Some goddamn trial and error bullshit, throwing the same boring parties for the losers in this town and falling asleep every week. What do you call it? Babe, that’s the scientific method at work.”

Blue threw her a withering gaze. “I don’t think throwing parties counts as the scientific method.”

“Oh ho! Tell me, Miss Public School, what would you call it?”

Blue was unamused. “I’m calling it B.S. There’s no way you can know I’m the one doing it. There were a bunch of people at that party.”

Kavinsky conceded the point graciously. “Yeah, okay, I don’t for sure, but two things.” She held up her pointer finger. “One, you’re the only one with psychics in the family. I mean, what are the odds? And two,” she held up another finger as she smiled, “Ronan talks too much. Besides,” her smile grew to a grin, “there’s an easy way to find out.”

Blue caught on a second later. “Oh, no way. I’m not falling asleep with you.”

“Ouch, lady, that hurts. I even bought you dinner first.”

“No!” Blue was adamant. “I’m not taking your weird pills, and I’m not going to be your ‘cute little battery’ for whatever nonsense you want to dream up next.” 

She wondered if Kavinsky would ditch her if she found out Blue wasn’t the battery, but she didn’t want to ask; she felt a little silly, being concerned about the dubious honor of Kavinsky’s attention, and she didn’t want her to notice this moment of insecurity. She felt angry, too, upset that this was why Kavinsky was interested. It didn’t have anything to do with Blue the person, just Blue the nebulous magical charger. She clenched her hands into fists beneath the table. 

Kavinsky, for all her faults, caught the shift in Blue’s mood, and Blue watched the smile drain from her face. 

Kavinsky leaned forward and ran her chain through her fingers, back and forth, back and forth. “I’d be a perfect fuckin’ gentleman. Better than.”

It wasn’t Blue’s only issue, but it ranked. How typical, Blue thought, that this is what occurred to Kavinsky instead of any of the other emotions playing across Blue’s face. Besides her anger and her insecurity—which in turn made her even more frustrated—she didn’t want to, again, be the conduit for something incredible without experiencing it for herself. She was surrounded by people who were special, unique, who touched magic every day and—excepting Noah—came away the better for it, or the more enlightened, or the more experienced. Blue felt sidelined; she tried not to let it bother her, and it didn’t most of the time, but—

But now she had an opportunity to see it for herself if she chose to believe Kavinsky. If Kavinsky was telling the truth and if Blue was the one who amplified Kavinsky’s dreams and if Blue wouldn’t be left alone, abandoned, at the end. If Blue could ignore the very real possibility that Kavinsky was only using her and that this was all just an elaborate bit of (hypothetical) foreplay before (metaphorical) coitus interruptus. There were a lot of _ifs_.

“I’ll think about it,” Blue said, careful. She just needed time to consider her options.

Kavinsky sat back, looking pleased. Blue remembered how she’d looked at that party all those weeks ago, thrilled after waking up. She looked a little like that now, albeit more subdued; she managed to stay in her seat. “Babe, take all the time you need. I’m a patient woman.” 

Sliding out of her seat, Blue snorted and dropped some cash on the table for her half of the pizza. Kavinsky looked at it and then at her but didn’t argue; instead, she pulled out a Sharpie she had tucked in her back pocket and wrote a phone number on one of the bills. She leaned over and tucked it into Blue’s pocket before quirking her eyebrow and the corner of her mouth.

Blue paused for a moment and then turned and left.

The thing, Blue thought as she lay in bed, was that jealousy was a powerful motivator. She loved her friends and she loved her family, but she wished she could, for once, be like them. She wanted to experience what they did, just a little, just once; perhaps more than that, she wanted to take charge of her destiny. It all felt so out of her control. Her amplification ability made a poor showing next to dreamers and psychics and half-forest girls and those-who-were-dead-but-lived-again, and, worse, her curse ensured that she’d never be able to have everything that she wanted. 

She wanted so much.

She wanted so much, and maybe with Kavinsky she could have this one small thing—the chance to dream. She’d be able to see what Ronan saw every time she fell asleep; what Adam felt when she connected to something larger than herself; what Gansey and Noah knew, in their bones, about life and death and the tenuous link between them.

It occurred to her, lying there, that she could try this with Ronan first. Ronan was a dreamer, and so the same principle should work with her as it would with Kavinsky. She’d be a safer choice than Kavinsky, certainly, but Blue—Blue was flattered by the attention, when it came down to it. Ronan had never given her the time of day, and while Blue didn’t feel the loss, she had experienced, over the past few weeks, what it would be like to have someone’s full attention. It was intoxicating, only the very edge of it soured by the idea that Kavinsky may be interested in Blue’s power as a battery rather than Blue herself.

And so, for better or for worse, she decided. The risks—the many, many risks—would be worth it, she thought, if she could grasp this with both hands. So, she would call Kavinsky, she’d consent to this experiment, and hopefully she wouldn’t live to regret it.

She crept downstairs. Even her house, a hive of activity, usually settled in the early hours of the morning, and tonight was no exception. She picked up the phone and dialed the number Kavinsky had written on the dollar bill.

Kavinsky picked up on the second ring. “K.” Blue paused at that; she hadn’t actually planned what she was going to say. Kavinsky listened to the pause and then continued, “Bitch, don’t ding dong ditch me.”

She didn’t sound like she’d been woken up, Blue thought, and then wondered how often she actually slept. Blue knew that Ronan slept badly and irregularly; maybe it was the consequence of being a dreamer, side effect of creating something from nothing.

“It’s Blue.” A strong start, she thought.

“Lady! Fancy meeting you here at, what, three in the morning? Do you have an answer for me?”

“Yes. Let’s try it.” She imagined Kavinsky pumping her fist on the other end of the phone. She blurted out, “Do you really go by K? Ronan never calls you that, not to us.”

Blue could hear the smile in Kavinsky’s voice. “Only the best and brightest do. Obviously, Ronan’s exempt from that category.”

Blue didn’t quite believe that, but—now that she’d made her decision—she could feel the time catching up to her. “Okay, so, I’ll see you, I guess.”

“See you on the streets.” The phone clicked off. 

Blue placed the phone back in its cradle and went to bed.


	3. Chapter 3

Apparently “see you on the streets” meant the road outside Blue’s house at the crack of dawn on a Saturday. She woke up to Maura sitting on the edge of her bed, legs curled under her and patting Blue’s leg.

“You have a friend waiting outside.”

Blue rubbed her eyes and then burrowed farther under her covers. “Tell them I’m busy. They should all know better.”

“I don’t think this one knows better,” said Maura. “This is your car girl, I think.”

“My _what_?” Blue was, suddenly, very awake.

“I haven’t seen her before.”

“Oh my God.” It must be Kavinsky. Blue was torn between hiding again under her covers—avoidance and cowardice at its finest—and yelling at Kavinsky to get off her lawn again, reason being that Saturday mornings were sacred. Blue got up and shooed her mom out of her bedroom; she decided to put the yelling on hold until she heard what Kavinsky had to say.

She got dressed and headed toward the kitchen, grabbing a yogurt from the fridge and pausing before grabbing a second. Kavinsky was, indeed, waiting in her car on the curb. She must have been watching the front door because she jumped out and circled the car to open the passenger-side door.

Blue got in and waited for Kavinsky to slide in on the other side. She handed over the yogurt. “I’m going to need the spoon back. We go through spoons fast.”

Kavinsky looked up from the foil top she was tearing off, spoon already in her mouth. She garbled around it, “Can do.”

They ate their yogurt in companionable silence with Blue handing over the fruit at the bottom of hers when she finished. Kavinsky didn’t skip a beat before accepting it and scarfing it down.

Blue waited until she was finished and then said, “If I say we need to go, we need to go. No exceptions. Assuming this,” she gestured expansively, “works, of course.”

“Yeah, dude, sure.” Kavinsky had finished the yogurt and had condescended to remove the spoon from her mouth before speaking.

“It’s just, sometimes when I do something using my...ability or whatever, I get tapped out.” Blue felt a little strange admitting this weakness to Kavinsky, but she supposed she’d rather say it now than have to explain in the middle of a dream.

“Yeah, you want to take it slow. Not the first time I’ve heard that.” Kavinsky stuck the spoon back in her mouth but looked like she was refraining from some sort of horrible fellatio. Blue was grateful. Kavinsky mumbled around the spoon, “Where do you want to do this?”

Blue hadn’t considered it. “I’d offer my house, I guess, but I think there’s too much going on. Psychically. Your dream might get confused.” Privately, she didn’t want Kavinsky anywhere near Calla. She didn’t much want Kavinsky near Maura either but considering how badly Calla took to Ronan, Blue doubted that Kavinsky would be an improvement. She also didn’t want either of them telling her what a stupid, dangerous thing she was doing with such a dangerous girl because she’d already figured that out. She paused, thinking. “Where do you normally go?”

Kavinsky quirked an eyebrow at her. “Nowhere I’d take a girl on the first date.”

Rolling her eyes, Blue said, “Ok, so you said you went to a new dreamplace at the Fourth party. Where was it? Maybe we should go somewhere like that if we can.” Blue thought, a little, that she was just making things up, but it sounded good, to go to a place that felt physically similar to the dream.

“I don’t know. It was just some woods, and it was more a feeling than anything. The place I usually go is some shitty, homicidal forest.” Blue snorted at that, and Kavinsky looked at her sidelong before continuing. “This time, it felt creepy but not, like, dangerous. There was some old stone building in the middle of the woods—the walls were all standing, and another wall around the outside, but nothing else.”

Kavinsky stopped and looked over at Blue, who was staring at her. “I know where that is,” Blue said, and she shivered a little; she’d been there before. She gave directions to Kavinsky, who promptly turned on some horrible, thumping music, volume turned down in deference to Blue.

Blue fiddled with the spoons, one of which she reclaimed from Kavinsky, and found herself running her fingertips around the bowl of one. She wondered if that was the one that had been in Kavinsky’s mouth and immediately stuck her hand under her thigh, blushing. She hoped Kavinsky hadn’t noticed, but she wasn’t about to look.

They arrived a little after eight, still abominably early for a Saturday. They parked on a street just off the main road; Blue clambered out of the car and said, “I hope you’re up for a hike.”

Kavinsky shot her a withering glance. “Do I look like the kind of person who’s ever up for a hike?” She didn’t, Blue thought. Fortunately, they didn’t have far to walk, although Blue guessed Kavinsky would do just fine in her track pants and sneakers regardless. Kavinsky reached into the backseat to pull out a water bottle before slamming the door.

Partway up the side of the hill, surrounded by trees blotting out the sun, Blue started to doubt herself. The last time she had been here, they’d buried Noah. Blue hoped that Noah wouldn’t mind, that she wasn’t being disrespectful by bringing someone else up here. She’d make sure to steer clear of the grave, but she wished now that she’d stopped at Monmouth to check with Noah first. It felt invasive, like knocking on someone’s door without being invited.

And with that, like Noah could feel Blue’s distress, she appeared. She didn’t blink into existence, and neither Blue nor Kavinsky startled, but Blue knew that Noah hadn’t been there before, just to the right of Blue.

Blue glanced at Kavinsky and then over at Noah. She took Noah’s hand and led her a little ways off before asking, “Is this ok? I’m sorry I didn’t check first; I wasn’t thinking. If you don’t want us here,” Blue stumbled a little over _us_ , “we’ll go.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind.” Kind, sweet Noah.

“Don’t—can you—” Blue hesitated, unsure how to ask and wanting to be sensitive about it.

“It’s okay,” Noah interrupted gently, patting the tufts of Blue’s hair as she spoke. “I won’t tell.” She glanced at Kavinsky and then back to Blue. “Be careful. Don’t let her take too much.”

“Promise.” Blue slung her arms around Noah’s back and held on for the space of two breaths, in and out, in and out. “Thank you.”

Noah patted her hair one last time and started wandering back down the hill before fading out of sight. Blue glanced back toward Kavinsky who stood with her mouth hanging open.

The first words out of Kavinsky’s mouth were “What in the holy hell was that?”

“That,” Blue said, making an effort to sound casual, “was Noah.” Loath to give up all Noah’s secrets, she continued. “She’s—special.”

“Uh huh, yeah, no shit. Care to elaborate?”

“Not really, no.”

Kavinsky let her be before drawing up short. In front of them was an old stone church, inside gutted and replaced with the dregs of the forest, all tall grass and twisted, gnarled saplings. The stone walls still stood, mostly, reaching up to kiss a roof that was no longer there, surrounding a floor that had abandoned God and man for Mother Nature. The short stone wall, marching around the perimeter of the church, looked the same as it had every time Blue had visited—keeping vigil over St. Mark’s Eve, exploring with Gansey, burying Noah. She remembered how creepy she’d found the church during the day, before Noah, but now the grass rasping together felt peaceful, the swish of it in time with a woodpecker in the distance, the leaves rustling overhead, squirrels scritching on the bark. Noah’s spirit lived in this place—maybe the church hadn’t changed, and Blue had instead.

She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of the woods, the sweetness of wood rotting, the flowers finally blooming, the coolness of the stone. She opened her eyes and looked behind her; she’d walked forward in her reverie, and Kavinsky still hung back, still staring at the ruin of the church. Blue wasn’t sure what to expect from her, what she would think about being confronted with the physical manifestation of her dream, a place she didn’t make.

Blue couldn’t read her, and, in the absence of a reaction, Blue figured she needed a nudge. “So how do you normally do this?”

Kavinsky turned her head in her direction, eyes still on the church. She dug around in her pocket without looking away and produced two green pills. Finally, she looked at Blue. “You take a trip with me, babe.” She looked around, maybe unwilling to dream in the woods, and Blue thought that she must not be used to falling asleep in places like this. Blue, on speaking terms with the great tree in her backyard and surrounded by this friendly place, felt at home.

Blue led the way to a clearing, moss plush underfoot, and sat down. It was a little damp from the rain, but she didn’t mind. Kavinsky followed her over and hesitated before sitting down next to her, looking like she was trying to hide her unease. She must have been shaken, Blue thought, if she couldn’t mask how she felt. Uncharacteristic.

Blue reached out one hand, and Kavinsky dropped a pill into the center of her palm, fingertips brushing Blue’s skin briefly before pulling back. Blue smiled weakly. “Mazel tov.”

“Here goes nothing.” Kavinsky put the pill on the edge of her tongue and took a sip from the water bottle, tossing her head back to make a show of it. She passed the bottle to Blue who followed suit and swallowed; she watched Kavinsky watch her through slitted eyes before they slid shut.

 

 

 

 

Blue woke up to the sound of Kavinsky whooping and slashing at the grass with a stick, all previous hesitance gone.

Kavinsky whirled to look at Blue. “Bitch! We did it! Sorry. Blue. My dude! We did it!”

“Did what? We’re still here.” Blue propped herself on her elbows, a little groggy, to watch Kavinsky dig a stone out of the dirt with the toe of her sneaker.

“You think? Pay attention.”

Blue looked around and only then noticed that this was unlike any forest she’d seen. Cabeswater, for all its strangeness, its mutability, was still a forest; trees were trees, rocks were rocks, streams were streams. Not here. Everything had gone backwards, upside down, flipped inside out. She ran her fingers over her bed of moss that wasn’t moss any longer, short and gray and coarse, and she sat up fast, grogginess gone. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move; she whipped around. A leaf scurried across the bark of a nearby tree, scritching with four legs. Scritching like the squirrels had done earlier, and suddenly Blue knew what she was laying on. She wondered if she pulled on the strange furry moss if it would come up red and oozing, as if the forest were a living thing and she were skinning it, or if the moss would only crumble innocuous dirt off the bottom. She remembered Cabeswater—Think it, and you make it so—and smoothed her hands over the fur née moss, refusing to pull and find out.

Instead, she gazed up at the trees again. Farther up the trunk, the branches—no longer wood, but stone—disappeared under layers of brown, wispy feathers, speckled with white and black, a touch of red, a bit of yellow. Blue craned her head to spot a bird, but she didn’t see any. The low wall around the church was brown rather than its typical homely gray; she was too far away to make out any details, but she guessed that if she pressed on that fence, it would yield with soft rot.

Kavinsky, having laid waste to her section of grass, dove down beside Blue and twisted her hands up behind her head. She grinned up at Blue, elated. “I knew it was you.”

Blue looked back at her and willed herself not to blush. She laid back down, pillowing her own head on her arms, and stared up at the trees. She could see the breeze blowing through the feathers, lifting and setting them down carefully, gently. They didn’t make a sound. It was odd—normally, walking through the woods, Blue could feel how alive they were, could hear the sound of it whispering through leaves and underbrush. This forest was different, alive and vibrant and visually spectacular but the sounds were muted, almost silent; it would be eerie if it didn’t feel so safe. This was Blue’s forest, more hers than Cabeswater or even the giant tree in her backyard. She glanced over; Blue’s forest, but also Kavinsky’s.

Kavinsky swung up onto one elbow next to her and made eye contact with Blue, holding it, gaze flicking down to her lips and back up. Blue looked back, and she could feel the tips of her ears getting warm. Blue looked away first, and Kavinsky started shredding the bark from the stick she was holding. She made a neat pile of the pieces, fiddling with that too, running her finger through it like she had with the salt the other night, lining up the fragments into neat lines and then blurring them together again. She rolled onto her back again, groping behind her until she produced a clump of grass which she gave the same treatment as the bark.

Blue touched the back of her hand with her fingertips, and Kavinsky froze. “Don’t hurt it.”

“Preemptive strike,” Kavinsky said, but she dropped the grass and fiddled with the edge of her shirt instead. She looked back at Blue, gaze hot, before clearing her throat.

Blue was content enough to lie here in her strange, furry clearing for now; in a minute, she’d get up to explore the dream, this magical place she’d never been, but she also had a feeling this wasn’t her last trip here. Kavinsky though, she guessed, had come for something else. “What do you want to dream up?”

Kavinsky paused. “I didn’t actually, like, think about it. I just thought about getting here.” She paused for a moment and then asked, “You hungry? I’m fucking starving.” She didn’t wait for Blue’s answer, instead leaning back again and closing her eyes.

She wasn’t asleep, Blue knew, because they slept still out there in the world. Blue could see a gentle furrow between her brows; for whatever it was Kavinsky wanted, she concentrated. Opening her eyes, Kavinsky grinned and snapped her fingers, and then she held out a plate piled with some kind of pastry. Blue didn’t see it materialize; she knew logically the plate wasn’t there before, but she couldn’t quite remember that it hadn’t been there before either. It simply was. She took a pastry, gritty and sticky with sugar against her fingers, and lifted it to her lips.

Stopped.

It hit her like a freight train, the exhaustion, the dizziness. She blinked, trying to clear her vision, and blinked again and again. Panting, she could feel her face drain, and she knew if she looked in a mirror her lips would be pale, colorless.

“What did you do?” Blue dropped the pastry from her hand and looked down at her fingers, shaking with fine tremors.

Kavinsky looked panicked. Blue thought through her own disorientation that Kavinsky didn’t know either. “I didn’t—” The forest started to change then. They both watched as the trees receded back into the earth, the grass and the brush melting and solidifying into gray pavement beneath them; Blue could feel it now beneath her hands, braced against the ground. Hard, cold, nothing like her friendly clearing. The ground, pavement now, sprouted—not trees, but buildings.

A city grew around them.

They watched apartment buildings grow from nothing, taller and wider and deeper each second. They were gray and boxy, perfect replicas of each other, all deteriorating and grim. Kavinsky leaped to her feet, progressing from panicked to scared, eyes round, as Blue watched.

Kavinsky looked down. “We have to go.” She knelt by Blue’s side; Blue couldn’t stand up on her own. She was so tired. She couldn’t think—she couldn’t think how to leave this place. Kavinsky grabbed her hand, squeezed hard, and closed her eyes. The furrow between her brows deepened as she willed them awake.

 

 

 

 

 

In the clearing, the real clearing, Blue opened her eyes slowly. She couldn’t think clearly, but she looked over. Kavinsky was still asleep. Blue rolled over and nudged; like a shot, Kavinsky sat up with one great gasp. Blue could have sworn that she hadn’t been breathing, but she was now, deep, heaving breaths, one hand pressed to her chest.

Kavinsky looked over at Blue, eyes wide. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know—are you okay?”

Nodding, Blue closed her eyes again. She didn’t have it in her to be angry although she could feel it, distant. There would be time for it later. She just wanted to sleep, really sleep, in her own bed, in her own house, not surrounded with graves and dreams and memories. “What was that? What did you do?”

She didn’t stay awake long enough to hear the answer.

-

“Blue. Blue. Blue.” She cracked her eyes to see Kavinsky leaning over her, patting her cheek. “Oh thank God. Your freaky friend,” Kavinsky glanced over her shoulder at Noah, standing among the trees, “has politely suggested that we get the fuck out of dodge. So, up and at ‘em.”

Kavinsky straightened up and grasped both of Blue’s hands. “Okay, ready? One, two, three, up!” She pulled.

Blue, levered upright, couldn’t stay that way for long. She slumped forward against Kavinsky, who huffed.

Blue meant to say something like “Don’t sigh at me” or “I’m not the one who got us into this mess,” but all she could manage was a prolonged mumble.

“Oooookay, no idea what you just said, but we’re leaving. Put your arms around my neck—good—I’m going to lift you up. Okay, there.” Blue obediently held on as much as she could, wrapping her legs around Kavinsky’s hips. She hoped she didn’t fall off halfway down the hill; this was embarrassing enough as it was.

Kavinsky took a few steps, overbalancing, overcorrecting, overbalancing again. “Goddamn, Blue. Okay. This’ll be fine.” Blue hooked her chin over Kavinsky’s shoulder and watched through fluttering eyelids as the church melted back into the distance and Noah back into the trees.

She slept.

-

The rumble of an engine, the shadows of tree branches ghosting across a window.

-

The murmur of voices, indistinct and cottony. A pillow underneath her head, a blanket tucked up under her chin.

-

The smell of a pie baking, room gone dark and moody.

-

Blue woke curled in her bed with her face mushed against her pillow. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, gritty, and dug a stubborn bit of it out of the corner of her eye. Light flooded in through her window; the last time she’d woken up, it had been dark. The night of which day, she wondered. If she missed any shifts because of this stupid plan, she was going to be pissed.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and stretched, back cracking, muscles in her arms and thighs loosening. Someone had changed her out of her dirty clothes, damp and muddy from the mossy clearing, she knew, because she now wore a nightgown—an oversized men’s t-shirt which had once sported the words “got smithsonian?” on the front—that had been softened by the wash and scrubbed of all text.

Pulling on a pair of leggings, she headed downstairs. She vaguely remembered smelling a pie, and her stomach was very interested in investigating.

Maura, Calla, and Persephone were waiting at the kitchen table for her. They would have heard her get up of course, or would have felt it, but Blue didn’t feel prepared to have the kind of conversation they would want to have.

Blue looked at Maura and suddenly knew what Maura would look like in another thirty years. Worry had pushed her eyes back in her sockets, bred dark circles, set the shape of her mouth in a frown. Maura hadn’t had much reason to worry, Blue thought, during the past sixteen years; even after St. Mark’s with Neeve, she hadn’t worried this much. Blue hung her head and rubbed at a skidmark on the tile with her big toe. A part of her, small and nasty, figured that it was about time she acted out her adolescence but she took another look at her mother’s face and sternly reassessed.

Maura said, “I think now is the time I ask where you were yesterday.” _Yesterday_ , Blue thought. Thank God. Today was Sunday after all, not Monday.

Blue didn’t see much point in lying so she squared her shoulders and said, “I was out experimenting.” She stumbled, then, and Calla raised an eyebrow. “I was dreaming.” This was devolving. Calla raised the other eyebrow. “I was performing a dream experiment. With Kavinsky. From Gansey’s school.” She twisted her fingers together behind her back and rocked on her heels a little. This was a new feeling, confessing in front of the three of them. She didn’t like it.

“Spill,” said Calla. While Maura’s worry made her softer and more worn, Calla’s honed the edge of her until she was sharp enough to cut.

Blue spilled. She explained that Kavinsky was a dreamer like Ronan—Calla sneered—and that Blue amplified her. That they went to a dream version of the church on the ley line. That Kavinsky pulled something, and the ground started to shift under them, and that this shift, likely, pulled too much from Blue.

 _Look at all that potential she holds in that cup_ , she could hear her mom saying in the back of her mind. She didn’t know what Maura would think about her _potential_ for reckless endangerment, and, now that she was here, she wished she didn’t have to find out.

Maura looked at Calla and then Persephone before looking back to Blue. “If I asked you to avoid doing this again, could you agree?”

That was the kicker, Blue thought; she hadn’t yet parsed her feelings about yesterday. She had set boundaries before she and Kavinsky dreamed, and she’d assumed those boundaries would be enough. She’d felt completely helpless though, afterwards, and she never wanted to feel helpless. She’d been too tired yesterday for fear, but now that she had presence of mind again, she felt the aftershocks of it. Anything could have happened, and anything might happen again if she chose to dream with Kavinsky.

On the other hand—on the other hand, before the disastrous city switch, Blue had enjoyed the morning. She’d felt so content during the dream, so at home, her body settling into the feeling, lying there in her clearing next to Kavinsky. It was beautiful and strange, and even now she wanted desperately to explore the dream. She should have explored when she had the chance, but it all went downhill so quickly.

Blue paused, still twisting her fingers together behind her back. “I can’t agree.”

This answer was, to judge by their faces, unsatisfactory but not unexpected.

“Well, that’s that then,” Maura said, looking distinctly unhappy about it. Blue saw Calla kick her shin under the table, but Maura ignored it. “Blue, remember what we taught you about protecting yourself, and...be careful.”

Calla’s face was a thunderstorm. Clearly not in favor of Maura’s chosen plan of action—inaction—she said, “That hellion is still outside.”

“What do you mean, still outside?” Surely that couldn’t mean that Kavinsky had been waiting outside her house the entire time—

The thunderstorm hadn’t cleared. “I meant what I said. She dropped you off and disappeared for twenty minutes. She’s been parked on the curb since. Your mother,” Calla cast a frozen glare in Maura’s direction, “has opted not to remove her from the premises.”

Persephone chimed in, tone just this side of wistful, before looking sidelong at Calla. “She appears to have done a bit of blow. Cocaine, you know, to pass the time.” Blue, temporarily distracted from the matter at hand, wondered about why Persephone seemed familiar with the idea. She snapped her attention back to Calla.

“All the more reason to kick her scrawny ass off our curb!”

Maura defended herself. “We don’t need the police around here, do we? Calla?”

Calla grumbled something that might charitably have been affirmation but mostly sounded like an ill-tempered string of vowels, and Blue was left wondering again what these three got up to without her.

Maura, having gotten Calla’s agreement—blood from a stone—turned back to Blue. “She’s outside so you may talk to her if you would like, but I feel that you should plan to spend the evening here.”

Blue nodded, practical. “I agree. I have work tomorrow.” She retreated down the hall, thoroughly disenchanted with the idea of teenage rebellion, and opened the front door.

Kavinsky, she could see from her front porch, was drumming her fingers on her steering wheel, head thrown back against the headrest. Blue could feel the bass from the car, and she wondered how Kavinsky wasn’t deaf with it by now. Maybe she could dream herself new eardrums. She wondered if Kavinsky could dream herself a new liver.

Dragging her feet a little, Blue walked down the short, narrow sidewalk in front of the house and rapped her knuckles on Kavinsky’s passenger-side window. Kavinsky lurched up, narrowly avoiding a crash with the steering wheel; she gestured at Blue out the window and leaned across the center console to pop open the door.

Instead, Blue shut the door without climbing in and opted to sit on the curb away from the car. Persephone’s nonchalance about the coke aside, she felt the sharp stab of frustration. She thought it would be nice to have this conversation with someone who wasn’t high.

Kavinsky scrambled to turn off the car and join her.

“So.” Blue cleared her throat. “What the fuck was that?”

Kavinsky stared at her open mouthed for a moment before laughing, short and hoarse. “Language!”

“I am not in the mood,” Blue said, sharp. She punctuated her words with her hand, first two fingers and thumb pressed firmly together. “What. Was. That.”

Kavinsky sobered a little, her pupils still blown wide, and Blue pursed her lips. Kavinsky’s eyeliner had smudged, darkening the circles under her eyes, drawing attention to her gaunt cheeks. Blue noted that she’d looked a little like this every time she’d seen her, fidgety and hollow cheeked, sans smudged eyeliner and sans the slight bit of concern that now pulled at the corners of her eyes and the edges of her lips. It hadn’t registered with Blue for weeks, but the smudges pulled the rest into sharp relief.

Kavinsky paused for a moment and then answered. “I don’t know.” She continued, fast, before Blue could say anything else. “I don’t. I didn’t know I could make the place change. I was only there twice before, and both times were so fast I didn’t pull anything. They don’t like me anyway, the dream places, not usually. Never, really, so I wasn’t—thinking.”

Despite the confession, Blue’s mood hadn’t improved. “First, that is not an apology. Calla’s on the brink of having you arrested.”

Kavinsky, not looking quite as chastened as Blue would have hoped, said, “She’s one of the parentals, right? She really ripped me a new one.” Blue rather thought Kavinsky deserved it, but Kavinsky continued. “I am. Sorry, I mean.” Kavinsky looked down at her shoes, scuffing them against the side of the curb.

Blue glanced from Kavinsky’s shoes up to her face and noticed three thin scratches on her cheekbone; they weren’t there before. Reaching over, impulse, she grasped Kavinsky’s chin and angled her cheek toward the sun. Kavinsky didn’t resist. “What happened?”

Kavinsky waited a moment, there in the warm sun with Blue’s hand on her chin, before jerking out of Blue’s grasp and staring down at her shoes again. “Your freaky friend kind of...freaked out. She wouldn’t touch you, and—I’ve never seen anything like it. She made those woods feel a lot like that shitty, homicidal forest I used to go to. Anyway, she did this,” Kavinsky tilted her chin again, “and told me I’d better get you off the mountain.”

It made sense, Blue thought, that Noah wouldn’t touch her. She must have been worried about draining even more from Blue, already unconscious and fading. Noah used to scratch Ronan, Blue remembered, after they found her bones on the ley line, before they buried her by the abandoned church. Normally so mild, Noah wouldn’t have lashed out unless Blue were really in trouble.

Blue paused to take this all in and to think about what she was going to say next. She didn’t want to abandon their dream experiment because of one mishap—although what a mishap it had been—but she hated slipping in and out of consciousness, losing time in a strange place with a strange girl, and she didn’t want to repeat it. She said slowly, “Okay, here’s the deal. I set some boundaries before this started, and those boundaries were not respected.”

“Technically—”

Blue cut her off with the point of a finger. “Don’t ‘technically’ me.” Kavinsky started pulling at the blades of grass, ripping their delicate leaves from top to bottom and grinding them underneath the tips of her shoes. “I passed out in the woods, and I did not enjoy being carried down a mountain, and it will not happen again.” She shuffled to face Kavinsky. “I’m not saying I don’t want to try again. I do. I’m just saying we need to wait.”

Kavinsky had, by this point, a small heap of pulverized grass by her feet; the verge was beginning to look worse for the wear. “You know, boundaries are overrated.” She looked over at Blue, finally meeting her eyes. “But I want to try again too. So, fine. Take it slow, right?”

Blue nodded. “Take it slow.” She stood up, dusting off the bottom of her shirt and the backs of her legs. “I’ll see you around.”

“See you.” Kavinsky got up from the curb, heedless of her pulverized pile of grass, and got in her car. She saluted out the passenger-side window before driving off into, Blue noticed, the sunset. Blue thought Calla would be happy that Kavinsky no longer haunted their curb, but she supposed none of them would be pleased at the idea of Blue continuing to see Kavinsky.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that this chapter contains a very brief mention of suicide ideation. I personally feel that it's very mild—and certainly no worse than events that occur in canon—but if you need a more detailed warning, feel free to message me at kavinskythots on tumblr.

Days passed. True to her word, Kavinsky took it slow, no longer trying to chauffeur Blue to and from her responsibilities.

On Wednesday, Blue spotted her parked on Main Street across from the small movie theater; she supposed business was booming now that school was out. Kavinsky waggled her fingers at Blue, and Blue pulled on her right ear, nervous, before raising her hand and waving back.

On Friday, at Nino’s, Gansey turned up all strained smiles and tense shoulders, which likely meant Ronan was getting back into bad habits. Blue could guess what that entailed; Ronan’s favorite bad habit was Kavinsky, and Blue tried very hard not to feel jealous about it.

On Saturday, again at Nino’s, Kavinsky breezed in with her pack on her heels; Blue didn’t remember them eating here so often before the night of the party those weeks ago. They were, however, well behaved, doubtless on Kavinsky’s orders—even Skov, or especially Skov. They didn’t sit in Blue’s section, but she could feel Kavinsky not-watching her, the back of Blue’s neck prickling, all anticipation.

On Tuesday, Blue caught Kavinsky loitering outside the public library. Persephone was doing a reading that would suffer for Blue’s presence, and so she was banished, politely and temporarily, from the house. She needed to return a book anyway and pick out a new one, so she didn’t mind.

She did not, however, expect to see Kavinsky there.

Kavinsky, watching Blue pedal to the bike rack, dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out on the pavement. Blue shook her head a little, privately, and locked her bike before walking over and saying, “That’s really bad for the environment.”

“Hmm?”

Blue gestured to the cigarette butt. “Your litter.”

Shrugging, Kavinsky said, “Yeah, but we’re all going to hell in a handbasket anyway, right?”

“Yeah, okay, _we_ ,” Blue gestured between them, “are not doing much of anything.” She stared pointedly at the cigarette, looked back up at Kavinsky, and raised her eyebrows.

Kavinsky stared at her a moment and then huffed before bending down to pick up the cigarette. She flicked it through the back window of her car, and Blue closed her eyes, praying it was well and truly extinguished. It was, apparently, because none of the detritus in her backseat caught fire.

Turning back to Blue, Kavinsky said, “Happy?”

“Very,” Blue replied, dry.

“So,” Kavinsky said, gesturing at the full bike rack. “Why are you still pedaling around like the rest of the plebs?”

Plebs. Blue ground her teeth. “That,” she said, “is because I am a pleb, and anyway what else am I supposed to do?”

“You got a sweet set of wheels! Come on. You’re telling me you look at that car every day and you’d rather do this instead?”

Blue still felt a little overwhelmed by the car’s power, although its steady presence in front of the house had started to tip the scales toward endearing. Now that she knew Kavinsky hadn’t stolen it—or worse, bought it—the car had stopped being a source of frustration, although Blue maintained it was still ugly. She wasn’t about to admit any of this to Kavinsky so instead she said, “I just don’t like driving. I got my license, but I haven’t had a lot of practice.”

“You need something to do besides dream, right? Take my award-winning driver’s ed, gratis.” Spreading her arms wide, Kavinsky said, “Babe, you’re looking at the best driver in the state.”

Blue laughed then. “That’s not what Ronan says. She says you’re a terrible driver.”

Kavinsky clutched her chest, tone playful. “Ouch, that hurts. It’s easy to look like you know what you’re doing when you’re driving her piece of shit. Dad cars? Come on. Look, if you’re worried about driving the new one, you can try mine.”

Laughing again, Blue replied, “No way. Your car smells like an ashtray, and I don’t know how to drive stick.”

“That’s what driver’s ed is for,” Kavinsky said, although she didn’t seem interested in pressing the issue. “You have the keys to yours, right?”

“At home.”

“Okay, it’s settled,” Kavinsky said, although Blue didn’t feel like they’d settled anything. “Grab ‘em and let’s go.”

Blue paused, weighing her dislike of the car against her desire to spend more time with Kavinsky before their next dream. Blue shook her head; driver’s ed with Kavinsky sounded incredibly stupid and reckless and dangerous and a waste of time and—

And it would be worth it, Blue thought, if it meant—if it meant they could spend more time together. Blue wasn’t much used to feeling embarrassed about her own feelings, but then again she hadn’t had quite this kind of experience before. “Fine. Don’t laugh.”

“Hand to God. See you in ten.” Kavinsky got back in her car and roared out the parking lot.

Blue hurried her library book to the return shelf and abandoned her typical browsing schedule in favor of heading back home. Kavinsky wasn’t at her house yet—she really must have meant ten minutes—so Blue walked up the steps to her room and shuffled through her desk for the car key. She had two now, one that came with the car and the other attached to the keychain Kavinsky had left at Nino’s. She chose the key with the keychain and, hearing the rumble of an overpowered car outside, pelted down the stairs and out the door.

And there was Kavinsky, standing by the blue demon, hands clasped behind her head, chin tilted up toward the sun, shades hiding her eyes. Blue—struck by the play of sun on her dark hair which now glinted copper, the breeze snagging at her shirt which billowed out around her stomach, the wisps of clouds reflecting in her mirrored sunglasses—cast her eyes heavenward and prayed for some chill.

Slightly chill, significantly less chill than she would like, Blue walked toward the car and Kavinsky. She tossed the keychain to Kavinsky who unlocked the car with the keyfob—a novelty, automatic locks—and slid in the driver’s side in tandem with Blue on the passenger side.

Kavinsky started the car—Blue could never prepare herself for the roar, for the vibration, for the power right underneath her—and said, “I know where we can go to practice.”

Blue nodded and faced front, surreptitiously placing her fingers on the side of the door to feel the car’s grumbling made tactile. The bass thudded through her fingertips, mixing with the vibration of the engine until Blue could feel nothing else. Soon enough, she pressed one foot hard to the floor, consequence of Kavinsky’s driving, and her fingers more firm to the door to brace herself. _Driver’s ed, my ass_ , she thought as they whipped around a bend in the road and then repeated the thought out loud.

Kavinsky laughed and said, “It’s not real unless it’s fun, babe.”

“Nice philosophy.” A wildly impractical philosophy, specialmade by a raven girl, Blue thought. She looked back out the window, trees and little ranch houses flying by. About halfway there, she clocked where they were going: the drag strip, home of Kavinsky’s annual party. Blue had, of course, been there before.

They pulled off the main road onto a stretch of hard-packed dirt, dusty from the dry weather, and kept going, the occasional bit of gravel dancing along the side of the car or pinging off the windshield. After a few minutes, they arrived, climbed out of the car, and surveyed the flat, packed field, anomalous among the mountains. Kavinsky whistled and then looked over the top of the car at Blue. “You ready?”

Blue took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

They switched places, passing each other at the front of the car and continuing around to the sides. Blue slid in the driver seat, still warm from Kavinsky, and pulled the seat up farther. Kavinsky wasn’t much taller than Blue, but every inch counted. She smiled a little, wryly; she wondered what Ronan would make of that.

She checked her mirrors; Kavinsky hadn’t adjusted them for herself, and Blue knew they’d be correct after her brief jaunt backwards down the driveway, but Blue checked them anyway as per recommendations made in her actual, real driver’s ed class; she didn’t think Kavinsky would be lecturing her on safe and responsible driving. She pulled the seatbelt across her chest and clicked it home; she waited for Kavinsky to do the same. Kavinsky, of course, did not take the hint, so Blue said, best imitation of her mother, “Seatbelt.”

Kavinsky looked at her sidelong and pulled the strap across her chest. Checking her mirrors one last time, Blue faced front again and gripped the steering wheel. In turn, Kavinsky snapped her fingers, rolled down the windows, and drummed on the dash—a blur of activity—and shouted, “Step on it!”

When Blue did not step on it, Kavinsky looked over at Blue, who was sure her face reflected some of her anxiety. Kavinsky said, “Okay, I’m guessing you learned on an automatic, which is why I dreamed you up an automatic. I’m right, yeah?”

Nodding, Blue replied, “Yeah, Calla’s car.”

Kavinsky continued, “The angry parental, right? Look, you can use the paddle shifters if you want but since you already know how to drive, you might as well just..drive.”

Blue, still stuck on paddle shifters, asked, “The what now?”

“Hmm? The paddle shifters? The little—” Kavinsky leaned across the console and pointed to two tabs on either end of the steering wheel, one with a plus sign and one with a minus. Blue suddenly, unexpectedly, had to concentrate hard on what Kavinsky was saying; her attention kept darting to Kavinsky’s side brushing the handbrake, hair—coconut and smoke—at eye-level, fingers wrapped around the wheel.

“Paddle shifters,” Blue repeated, throat a little dry.

“For driving manual.” Kavinsky glanced down at Blue’s foot on the brake and, still leaning over the console, yanked the gearshift down to the last setting and nudged it over. “Like if you’re too much of a pussy to buy a stick.” Blue felt the car shift through her foot on the brake, a little shudder tingling against the sole of her foot as the car settled into manual.

Blue raised a single eyebrow—“Uh huh”—and watched Kavinsky put the gearshift back in park.

“Okay, so, giddyup or whatever it is y’all say down here,” Kavinsky said, a parody, as she sat up. “The point of my driver’s ed is to go as fast as you can. Really simple. Tried and true.”

At that, Blue took her foot off the brake and turned to face Kavinsky. “I can’t afford to crash.”

Laughing, Kavinsky replied, “Babe, I’ll dream you up a new car.”

“No, I can’t afford a hospital visit.” Blue didn’t care about so much about the car as she did about her mother’s face when she got the bill.

Kavinsky, still smiling a little, eyes twinkling, said, “Babe, I’ll dream you up universal healthcare.” She must have noticed Blue’s hesitance because, tone softer, she said, “Look, there’s nothing to hit. It’s just dirt.”

Blue took a breath. “Yeah, okay. Let’s—” and she sighed. “Giddyup.”

Laughing again—so cheerful today!—Kavinsky said, “Let’s go!” as Blue pulled the gearshift back and took her foot off the brake. They rolled forward, faster than Blue would have expected without any gas, and she put her foot on the accelerator, pressed it down. The car leaped forward, all newly dreamed enthusiasm, tires kicking up dust in the rearview mirror. Blue pressed down on the gas harder until the car roared, joyful; Kavinsky whooped out loud, pitched high over the engine, as Blue hit 3,000 RPM, the tachometer dropping back down and swiftly climbing again.

The end of the drag strip loomed, the flat, dirt-packed field starting to rise and morph into rolling hills. Blue switched her foot to the brake, gently pressed it down. She could feel the gears shifting down, the engine quieting into its now-familiar friendly roar. As she slowed, she turned the wheel until she faced the other direction, staring back at the field now mirrored.

Kavinsky looked over at her and grinned. “It’s good, right?”

Not quite able to tamp down the rush she felt driving that car, Blue grinned back. “It’s good.” It was good, Blue thought, so different from navigating around other drivers, braking at stop signs, slipping on wet leaves in the fall. This, here, was joyful and uncomplicated—just a fast car and two girls in an empty field free of responsibilities.

Kavinsky, leaning across Blue’s lap, rolled down all four windows; Blue steadfastly stared out the windshield and did her best to ignore Kavinsky’s shirt ghosting across Blue’s arms, hair—for the second time today—at eye level, the studs shot through her ears. Kavinsky levered herself back up and turned off the air conditioning.

The air outside, saturated with midday Virginia heat, bullied its way into the car, transformed into a breeze, and wound its way over Blue’s skin. The temperature in the car started to rise, but it felt right compared to the artificial chill of the air conditioning; Blue breathed in, her fields and her mountains present and peaceful.

“Let’s go again,” Kavinsky said, breeze kissing the tips of her hair. “You might get a mouthful of dust but it’ll be worth it.”

This time, Blue didn’t hesitate before jamming her foot against the accelerator, the car leaping forward and climbing through gears faster than before, up and up and up. The wind whipped through her hair, dislodging clips and buffeting against her temples until her hair spiked out in every direction. She could feel a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth, hair askew, cheeks flushed. She could see Kavinsky out of the corner of her eye, laughing with her elbow out the window and hand gripping the roof of the car.

The end of the strip closed in—fast—so Blue hit the brake, a little harder than she had intended, a little more sudden. They lurched to a stop, thrown against their seatbelts, and Kavinsky let out a whoop in single-minded celebration.

“Next time,” Kavinsky said, “you’re driving my car, and we’re gonna teach you to drift.” She threw the gearshift forward to park, leaving her hand resting on the top.

Blue said, “I can’t drive this one?” The concept of drifting, familiar only from movies, seemed intimidating, and driving a stick seemed worse.

“It’s harder to do in an automatic, and it’s more fun with a stick. And besides, they say driving a manual is a valuable life skill,” Kavinsky said, wry.

Blue glanced down at Kavinsky’s hand on the gearshift, palm covering the tip. “Why do you like driving stick so much? It seems kind of,” Blue paused. “Phallic.”

Surprised, Kavinsky laughed. “Phallic, huh? Come on. I don’t discriminate between the dicked and the dickless.”

Blue blushed. Reaching her hand out, she touched the back of Kavinsky’s hand with her fingertips. Her skin was startlingly soft; she didn’t know why, but she assumed it would be rougher, consequence of a girl who seemed not to care for anything.

Kavinsky flicked her eyes down to their hands and back up to Blue before turning her hand over, palm up, back still resting in the gearshift. Blue thought, for a moment, how dangerous this was, how quickly she approached a line she could not cross. Blue, her fingertips now touching Kavinsky’s palm, drew them up across the heart line towards Kavinsky’s fingers; Kavinsky shuddered a little as if tickled. Lacing her fingers through Kavinsky’s, Blue gripped, and Kavinsky gripped back.

Blue flipped their hands over and, with her other hand, touched the back of Kavinsky’s, running her fingers over the smooth skin, the lines of the tendons, the ridges of her knuckles. She traced the veins, blue, ran her fingertips around her cuticles and the edges of her nails, back down to the jut of the bones against her skin.

Blue had kept her attention on their hands, forbidden territory, but now she looked back up to Kavinsky whose attention hadn’t wavered. Blue met her eyes, and Kavinsky’s gaze was hot.

Kavinsky laid her free hand over Blue’s and pulled their hands to her chest; if Blue concentrated, she imagined she could feel the beat of Kavinsky’s heart against the edges of her fingers. Kavinsky leaned forward, across the console, and Blue closed her eyes for a moment, wishing.

Wishes though—wishes weren’t meant for girls like her, so she opened her eyes, snatched her hands out of Kavinsky’s grasp, and leaned back against the driver’s side window. “Don’t—”

Kavinsky stared at her, open-mouthed. “Are you shitting me?”

“No, I’m not shitting you. I can’t do this,” Blue replied, her voice cracking. She’d come so close, too close, and now all she wanted to do was leave this car and walk back home. Rapidly, she reassessed; she didn’t want to leave this car, not really. All she wanted to do was kiss Kavinsky, here, now, in the warmth of the sun and the safety of the car, but she couldn’t.

“Why,” Kavinsky started, “the fuck not?”

Sharp, Blue said, “Don’t talk to me like that.” Kavinsky looked, for a moment, suitably chastened, so Blue continued. “I can’t—this is as far as we can go, and that’s it. That’s all there is.” She recalled Gansey’s voice from the graveyard: _That’s all there is._

“Fine,” Kavinsky didn’t sound like it was fine, “but why? Is this some weird, puritanical thing because I know we’re in the land of opportunity and everything but I’m not—”

“No.” Blue cut her off. “Do I look like a Puritan? No, I just—it’s not important.” It was very important, and Blue felt in this moment like the entire world hinged on this deficiency of hers, and it made her feel small. She hated it.

Kavinsky pressed her lips together. “It feels kind of fucking important.”

Sighing, Blue fidgeted with the edge of her shirt and studied Kavinsky’s face. She could see the hurt there, and it surprised her for a moment, but then she supposed Kavinsky didn’t have much practice with rejection. A small part of her, a part that was always angry, figured that it was about time Kavinsky learned, but mostly—mostly Blue didn’t want to make anyone feel shitty if she could prevent it.

And so, she relented. “My family’s always said that if I kiss my true love, they’ll die.”

“True love, huh?” Kavinsky paused and then gestured between them. “So what are you worried about?”

Blue didn’t think Kavinsky grasped the salient point. “Did you hear me? They’ll—die. Dead. Just like that.”

“So what if they do? The world’s a nightmare. Might as well carpe this diem or whatever.”

“I. I mean. What?” Speechless, Blue stumbled through her thoughts. Surely Kavinsky didn’t mean they should just disregard potential consequences; after a moment though, she thought that this was exactly the kind of behavior that made Kavinsky infamous. And with that, she started to feel frustrated. This destiny—this curse—had defined her entire life, and she wanted someone else to recognize its gravity.

Kavinsky shrugged, gaze flicking down to Blue’s lips and back up. “Seems like it would be worth it.”

“No! We aren’t going to carpe any diems! You might not care, but I—” Blue stopped short. “I definitely care if I kill someone.” She couldn’t say she cared about Kavinsky, not out loud; she told herself sternly that one dream romp and one trip in a fast car did not affection make. Or, she thought, maybe it did affection make, but she couldn’t admit it to Kavinsky.

Tone light, maybe forced, Kavinsky said, “Whatever,” and leaned back into her seat. Frustration ebbing, Blue felt her absence like a chill across her skin, warmth withdrawn to the other side of the car; she missed the heat.

“Look,” Blue said, “we can’t do this, but we can try dreaming again, right? I’m ready to try again.” Kavinsky asked for too much, maybe without realizing, but Blue wanted to give her something. Give both of them something, something within her power to give, and a new dream would work. Blue would make it work.

“Yeah, okay,” Kavinsky said, straightening up in her seat. “Now?”

Blue replied, “No, not now. Next week. I’m not free until next week.” She had shifts at Nino’s and a long list of odd jobs she’d volunteered to do for her neighbors in exchange for compensation and, doubtless, plates of cookies and glasses of lemonade. She and Adam had also both contrived to be free on Thursday, and Cabeswater beckoned. “I’m not part of the idle rich.”

Laughing, Kavinsky shrugged. “Fair enough. When?”

“Monday?”

Kavinsky said, “I can do Monday.”

“Whatever you did last time, please try to not do it again,” Blue said. She thought that she did not like missing time, and she’d prefer to keep that particular experience in the past.

Kavinsky made what Blue assumed was meant to be a cross over her heart but looked more like the sign of the cross and said, “Hope to die.” That would have to be good enough. She looked at Blue for a moment and then smirked. “Are you driving us back? Come on. You can do it.”

Blue said, “In this thing? No way. I have a reputation to maintain.”

Kavinsky laughed again and said, “That’s probably shot to shit by now.” She opened the passenger-side door, clambered out, and starting walking around the front of the car. Blue stuck one leg over the center console and shimmed into the passenger seat more or less gracefully. Much more gracefully, Kavinsky opened the driver-side door and slid in.

With none of Blue’s caution, Kavinsky yanked the gearshift into drive and pressed down on the accelerator until they flew forward, charging across the scant remains of the drag strip and back out to the pavement. They roared down the road, wind whipping through the open windows. Blue lost a hair clip to the backseat and then another; she watched Kavinsky’s short hair fly across her forehead and then back again, an endless loop.

Too soon, they arrived at Blue’s house, and Kavinsky parked smoothly in front of 300 Fox Way. Blue had been thinking on the drive over; she was so unsure about what Kavinsky wanted and afraid of her own feelings, afraid of the inevitability that this would end with Blue alone again. She’d spent so long trying not to think about her curse, trying to accept her destiny, but today—today, for the first time in a long time, she felt the loss bitterly. As she exited the car and walked up the short sidewalk to her front porch, she heard the car door shut, another open, shut again, and then the sound of Kavinsky driving away.

Dashing at her traitorous eyes before they had a chance to well up, Blue let herself into the house. Giving the kitchen a wide berth, she ran up the steps; she didn’t want to talk about it.

- 

The next few days passed in a blur of activity. Blue, Gansey, Ronan, Adam, and Orla explored the lake, all of them staring at Orla’s long, long, bikini-clad body—Blue in exasperation and the rest in awe. Gansey and Adam left for D.C.; Ronan elected to stay behind and get into God knows what. Noah let Blue into Monmouth in their absence, and, there, amid the cardboard and the dust and rusty rafters, Blue had what she knew would be her first and last kiss.

Blue woke up Monday morning with a memory ghosting across her lips, and she rolled over to bury her head in her pillow. It wasn’t fair, she thought, and it was very stupid to have allowed herself that moment with Noah when she couldn’t ever experience it again. Still, as she turned her head to look out over her room, running one finger across her lips, she supposed that truth was in the knowing of it, and now she knew. One more mystery conquered, for better or worse.

She climbed out of bed and got dressed, remembering that today she was slated to dream again with Kavinsky. It set her pulse to jumping, the idea of it, and she hoped Kavinsky sorted out whatever glitch tapped her energy last time.

Fox Way had already emptied by the time she entered the kitchen, the adults of the house all strangers to summer breaks, scattered to various responsibilities around town. After pulling a yogurt out of the fridge and tearing off the foil lid, Blue sat at the table and ate. She wondered about the glitch from last time, if it was all Kavinsky or if she had something to do with it. Regardless, she decided, she would have to keep a close watch on her own thoughts; she had practice thanks to Cabeswater’s sensitive mutability.

She heard the rumble of a car outside and, assuming it was Kavinsky to pick her up, threw away the nearly empty container, tossing her spoon in the sink. She ran to the front door and then, schooling herself into nonchalance, waited inside to see what Kavinsky would do. It turned out that Kavinsky, in lieu of honking her horn, opted to walk up the front sidewalk and knock on the front door. Gratified, Blue swung open the front door and greeted her.

“You ready?” Kavinsky asked. 

Blue smiled involuntarily. “Yes. Did you eat already?”

“Yeah, I’m good. Let’s get this party started.”

Blue followed her back down to her car, the passenger door of which Kavinsky swung open for her. Remembering the last time Kavinsky opened the door for her, all those weeks ago, Blue blushed a little and climbed in. So much had changed in a month, and she was a little surprised at how different she felt.

She waited until Kavinsky slid in the driver’s side, and then Blue turned to face her. “So where are we going this time?”

Kavinsky replied, “I have an idea, but it’s a surprise. Okay. I think as long as we start out in one place and don’t transition to another, we’ll be good. I think it was the change that fucked us last time.” She smiled a little. “So to speak.”

Kavinsky drove them just outside town limits, and Blue recognized where they were heading—toward the bridge that crossed over the river. Instead of driving over the bridge, Kavinsky veered off to the side, taking a narrow dirt track down the hill. Ahead was the bridge’s underpass, cool and dark against the Virginia summer sun.

It seemed, truthfully, a little creepy, but Blue figured she was in this deep, and—for better or worse—she trusted Kavinsky. She figured that Kavinsky was the most threatening thing in this town, and they seemed to be getting on fine; what else could compare?

Kavinsky turned off the car and climbed out; Blue did the same before Kavinsky could open the door for her. Blue asked, “Why here?”

Kavinsky shrugged and then grinned. “Inspiration.”

Cryptic.

They walked down to the edge of the river, stopping short of the trickling water which burbled and spit against river rocks and bridge concrete. Gesturing at the ground, Kavinsky sat, and Blue joined her, grabbing the water bottle Kavinsky passed her. Kavinsky produced two green pills, just like last time, and handed one to Blue who said, bravely, “Bottom’s up.” She dropped the pill in her mouth, unscrewed the water bottle, tipped it into her mouth, and swallowed. Kavinsky followed suit, and Blue hesitated a moment before laying down. Kavinsky lay down too, head dangerously close to Blue’s, hips and knees nearly knocking together. Blue wished they would for a moment before reminding herself that it would be better if they didn’t—her last thought before she slept.

 

 

 

 

She opened her eyes to a cool, gray sky, chill whiplash from the familiar summer heat she’d just left. Blinking twice, she looked over at Kavinsky who was just rousing, rubbing at her eyes and looking over to Blue. Kavinsky smiled at her, not mocking or mischievous but warm and content; Blue decided she liked that smile.

A breeze wound itself around them, running over bared legs and arms and caressing noses and cheeks. Blue shivered, and Kavinsky frowned a little before looking around.

“So...I meant to dream you the summer.”

This definitely didn’t feel like the summer, the sky overcast and the air just a touch too cold to be comfortable. Blue propped herself up on two arms to look around, not quite registering where they were. Immediately surrounding her was low, dark scrub battling against silt and soil to reach the sun, and Blue saw, just beyond the tips of her toes, a muddled, marshy pond edged in green. Farther off, she saw a gray expanse stretched in front of them, dotted with harsh scrub, and then—

And then, the ocean.

Blue gasped and jumped to her feet. Unlike the sand stretched out before her, the ocean rolled and foamed and slid up the beach, spitting at what it couldn’t reach and sliding back down defeated. It reminded her, just a little, of the small, burbling, spitting river they’d just come from, and she now understood what Kavinsky meant by “inspiration.”

The ocean, gray as the sky and the sand, rollicked furiously. Awestruck, frozen in place, Blue suddenly understood that if they’d come in the gentle summer sun, the ocean wouldn’t be quite like this, wouldn’t be raging at her, and she was grateful she could see its power laid out in front of her.

She turned and threw herself toward Kavinsky, wrapping her arms around Kavinsky’s neck, stretching on her tiptoes to do it. She buried her face in Kavinsky’s shoulder and whispered, “Thank you,” unsure if Kavinsky would be able to hear her.

Kavinsky, in turn, hesitated a moment before wrapping her arms around Blue’s waist, arms crisscrossing and hands resting on either side of her ribcage. She felt Kavinsky lay her head against her own and whisper back, “You’re welcome.”

Blue drew back then, a little embarrassed, and Kavinsky said, “I really did mean to bring you here when it was warm.”

Shaking her head, Blue replied, “No, this is perfect.”

“Come on,” Kavinsky said, holding out her hand. “I want you to see something.”

Blue took her hand, fingers lacing through Kavinsky’s; she felt a little flushed, and she was glad of the warmth radiating from Kavinsky. Walking around the marshy pond and through the dense scrub, they came to the sand, wet from what Blue guessed was a recent rainstorm. A little farther and they were on the beach, the proper beach, surrounded by sand and water and the sky above.

Kavinsky kicked off her shoes, and Blue followed suit, sinking her toes deep into the wet sand and curling her toes. It was too cold for this, she thought, but she didn’t care. The sand squelched up through her toes, and she laughed; earlier that summer, they’d had a magnificent thunderstorm which turned her entire backyard into a muddy wasteland, and she’d spent an hour standing outside under her tree with an inch of mud winding its way through her toes. This, now, felt a little like that but grittier, coarser, colder.

She loved it.

Pulling on her arm, Kavinsky stopped her and then said, “Close your eyes.”

Blue narrowed them instead and asked, “Why?”

“Come on, just do it. Trust me.”

Ugh. Trust. For the second time that day, it occurred to Blue that she did trust Kavinsky, but it wasn’t entirely comfortable. She closed her eyes and allowed Kavinsky to lead her by the hand, listening to her directions to avoid stepping barefoot on seashells or rocks or, once, a beached horseshoe crab.

Pulling her up short, Kavinsky told her to wait, grasped her by the shoulders and positioned her just so; she said, “Open your eyes.”

Blue did. Visible even through the haze and the gloom of this cold, spring day, past the roiling, gray waves, she could see buildings. Rows of them marched across the opposite coastline and, farther back, rose higher and higher until they pierced the clouds. Blue pulled Kavinsky, their hands still linked, toward the water, wading knee deep in the surf, the waves pounding against them and threatening to push them over. Blue was surrounded by gray, floating in it, wrapped in its embrace. Beneath and behind her, the sand; on three sides, the crashing waves; before her, the city skyline.

She breathed, “Where are we,” not letting go of Kavinsky. She’d guessed, the skyline famous even to her, but she waited for Kavinsky to respond.

“That’s New York. We’re in Jersey, baby.”

Blue and Kavinsky stood there in silence, watching the waves and the skyline and the hazy shapes of the clouds passing overhead; before long, though, Blue started shivering, up to her knees in frigid water without the benefit of the sun to warm her. She felt Kavinsky pull on her arm, leading her back up to the beach where Kavinsky closed her eyes for a moment, brow furrowed. Then, like the pastry that had appeared in the dream woods, a small heap of blankets materialized behind them on the beach.

Kavinsky glanced at the pile and then at Blue, who still felt fine even after this dream manifestation. Kavinsky grinned. “See? I can still dream this shit up.” She dropped Blue’s hand, lingering a little and walked back to the blankets. Picking up all but one, she tossed them to Blue who narrowly caught them in both hands. Kavinsky spread the last blanket across the sand, just out of the water’s reach. She gestured to Blue, and Blue, arms still full of blankets, walked over and dumped them in Kavinsky’s arms. They both plopped down on the blanket, Blue running her hand over the soft, quilted material of it.

The blanket was warm—not just blanket-warm but sun-warm, like it had been spread across a clothesline in the height of summer, soaking up the sun’s rays and the smell of trees and July’s midday heat. Blue expected the damp from the sand to start seeping through, to cool the blanket from the bottom up, but it didn’t, and she was grateful.

Kavinsky slid up next to her and spread one blanket across their criss-crossed legs and another around their shoulders. She pulled the blanket around both of them, pulling them closer together until their knees knocked and their shoulders rubbed together. In companionable silence they sat with the crash of the waves as backdrop.

Blue reached over toward Kavinsky, entwined their fingers together, and leaned her head on Kavinsky’s shoulder. She thought that this was the most romantic thing she’d ever experienced; she wasn’t often given to romantic whims, too practical, but as her toes warmed under the blankets and she felt the steady heat radiating from Kavinsky, she thought, a little sadly, that a kiss was the only thing missing.

She closed her eyes briefly, resolving not to think about it, and opened them again to the view of the New York City skyline, its vastness, the lapping of the waves just beyond their feet, their larger cousins crashing just beyond. She didn’t want to ruin the mood, what had been a perfect day so far, but—as she sat here with a raven girl who seemed to get nothing out of the dreams she’d been so excited about—Blue wondered, really, what motivated Kavinsky. She wished she could stop thinking about it, to just embrace to moment, but Blue had never been good at living in the moment.

She started by saying, a little hesitant, “Can I ask you something?” Kavinsky had been acting different all day, the rough edges of her sanded off, just a little, just enough not to cut. Blue felt like she’d seen this version of Kavinsky before in bits and pieces—once outside the school, once at Nino’s alone, even right after their first dream. Not for this long though, not consistently, and this same consistency had Blue second guessing everything.

“Shoot.”

Still hesitating, still unsure, Blue asked, “Why are you doing all this? You know, what’s the point?”

Kavinsky paused and then leaned her chin on Blue’s head; Blue could feel the edges of her mouth move against her forehead as she asked, “What do you mean?”

Blue drew back at this, loath to leave the warmth of her side, but she decided she wanted to see Kavinsky’s expression, to see the look in her eyes, to judge honesty and intent. “I mean that you started all this to supercharge your dream and to dream something spectacular, and all we’ve done is go to the beach.” She tried not to sound accusatory as she said, “What’s in it for you?”

Kavinsky looked a little like a deer in the headlights before she tried to play it cool. “Just the pleasure of your company, lady.”

Blue scoffed, and Kavinsky said, “I’m serious, you know. All those months I looked for you, I just thought about all the things I could pull when I found you, how fucking sick the Fourth would be. You and me, babe. But then…”

Kavinsky swallowed, and Blue thought she looked a little twitchy, a little nervous. “But then I did find you, and you weren’t what I was expecting. Nothing worked on you the way it worked on...other people,” and at this, Blue expertly substituted _other people_ with _Ronan_ , who had never been immune to Kavinsky’s dubious charms. “And I figured, I don’t know, maybe I should try something different, and so I did, but I miscalculated, and I ended up,” Kavinsky paused to duck her head and mumbled, “kind of liking you, or whatever.”

Blue tried very hard not to stare at her open-mouthed, but it was a close thing. She didn’t want to embarrass Kavinsky because she understood how Kavinsky felt, that after all of it they’d wound up here, together. After this confession, she felt a little like she should reciprocate so she said, slowly, “I kind of like you too, or whatever.”

She leaned her head back on Kavinsky’s shoulder and watched the waves. She could feel Kavinsky lay her chin on her head, like before, now heavy with the weight of their mutual confession. Kavinsky’s lips moved gently across Blue’s forehead as she whispered, “This is the part where I’d kiss you, if I could.”

Blue waited while the tide pulled in, drifted back out, back in, eddied by their feet. “This is the part where I’d let you, if I could.” Worrying that her chin might start wobbling, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath before looking out over the water. Kavinsky put her arm around her shoulders under the blanket and held her tight.

They waited there, together. Blue didn’t know how much time passed while they sat, the breeze kissing their cheeks but rebuffed by warm blankets. Clouds passed overhead, pregnant with rain; they could see it in the distance over New York, the rain sweeping across the ocean and towards them.

Regretful, Blue said, “I think we need to go.” The rain was bad timing, she thought—she’d rather stay here, cuddled on the beach. She’d decided that she believed Kavinsky, for this, more than anything else, rang true, and she wanted to stay on the beach and bask in the warmth of reciprocation.

“Yeah, okay,” Kavinsky said as she lay back against the blankets. She tugged Blue down with her and clasped their hands again as she closed her eyes and willed them awake.

 

 

 

 

Blue woke first and watched Kavinsky start awake like a shot. Tired but not exhausted, not like last time, Blue felt relieved that it had worked, that Kavinsky was right about the rules of the dream places they went. She felt no worse than she did after working in someone’s flowerbeds all day or taking a second Nino’s shift after a long day at school—ready for bed, ready for a nap, a gentle and familiar weariness. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, and it made her feel quiet and calm.

Kavinsky stood first and reached down with both hands to lever Blue up. Unlike their first dream together, Blue managed to walk to the car on her own just fine, although she noticed that Kavinsky hovered a little, kept glancing at her in case she fell over. Blue said to her, “I’m fine,” and watched Kavinsky relax by inches.

They drove to Blue’s house in companionable silence, Blue mulling over what, she felt, was an actual epiphany. She’d always assumed epiphanies were the stuff of fiction—lightbulbs flashing, bells dinging, somebody shouting eureka and running through the streets. This though, this crept up on her slow, spreading until she felt every bit of herself lit up from the inside out.

Parked outside 300 Fox Way, Blue said, “I have an idea.”

“Do you now?” Kavinsky replied, smiling.

“Yes. Can we do this again in a couple days? I want to try something,” Blue said.

“Yeah, okay.”

Relieved, Blue said, “How about on the fourth? Before your party?”

“Speaking of, you wanna come?” Kavinsky waggled her tongue and then grinned at Blue.

Rolling her eyes, trying not to laugh, and failing, Blue said, “Yes,” and hopped out of the car. She shut the door and then leaned down to drape her arms through the open window. “Pick me up at noon.”

“Seriously,” Kavinsky said, “what are we doing?”

Blue paused, still leaning in through the window. “We’re killing destiny.”


	5. Chapter 5

Punctual. Against all odds, Kavinsky was punctual.

She rolled up to Blue’s house at two minutes till noon where Blue was already waiting on the stoop, anxious to try her idea. Blue bounded down the sidewalk and slipped into the passenger seat before Kavinsky could turn off the car; Kavinsky looked at her, bemused, and said, “Okay, what’s your big plan?”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” said Blue. “I’m going to think about my curse, you’re going to dream it, and I’m going to kill it.”

Kavinsky stared at her. “Okaaay,” she said, drawing out the second syllable. “How? The dream doesn’t listen to you. No offense.”

“None taken,” Blue said briskly. “We’re going to Cabeswater. It changes all the time based on what we think.”

“Cabeswater?”

At this, Blue paused. She knew Kavinsky wouldn’t like this plan, not with her history with the forest. “Yeah. The, uh, how did you describe it? The shitty, homicidal forest you hate? We’re going there.”

Kavinsky recoiled and held up both her hands. “Woah, woah, woah, no way. I’m not dying in those fucking woods.”

Reaching over, Blue put a hand on Kavinsky’s knee. “Just explain that you’re not there to take anything. It’ll listen to you, and, if it doesn’t, it’ll listen to me, and if that doesn’t work either, we’ll leave.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Blue said. “Promise. I’ll think of something else.”

“Oh my fucking God.”

Blue felt Kavinsky go rigid under her hand, the muscles in Kavinsky’s leg looped tight and ready to spring. Blue asked again. “Please? This could—This could change everything. For me, I mean. This could change everything for me, and I—I want you to be a part of it.”

Taking a deep breath, relaxing little by little, inch by inch, Kavinsky reached out to entwine their fingers together, thumb rubbing over Blue’s knuckles. Kavinsky relented and said, “Where do you want to go?”

It was Blue’s turn to take a deep breath and relax, and she placed her other hand on top of Kavinsky’s. “Up to you. Probably wherever you feel comfortable.”

“I’m comfortable wherever you are, babe,” Kavinsky said, wry.

“Sure.” Blue smiled back at her and then said, failing to be serious at all, “But seriously.”

Kavinsky said, “Yeah, okay,” and shifted away from park. Kavinsky drove them away from town, which melted into fields, which in turn melted into scattered barns and herds of cattle and the long, low buildings that housed chickens and turkeys. They arrived at, and then passed through, Deering, the next town over, and kept going.

Finally, they nosed into what Blue recognized as the old Rockingham County fairgrounds, former waystation for weddings and festivals and flea markets. Then Blue saw them, rows and rows of white cars on one side, a narrow dirt path in the middle, and a handful of blue cars lined up on the other. Her blue car, or copies of it, sat opposite Kavinsky’s gleaming, white copies, and suddenly Blue knew this was where Kavinsky chose to dream. She found it charming that Kavinsky had dreamed copies of the car she gave to Blue, as if to get it exactly right before gifting it to her.

Kavinsky parked and got out of the car, and Blue followed. Walking down the path, Kavinsky led them down the row while Blue peered in through the windshields of the cars they passed. Most of the cars were trashed on the inside—littered with empty or shattered bottles, crumpled up cans, one a burnt out husk, another with the upholstery slashed apart. Blue felt like she walked through something intensely personal and private, a graveyard filled with rage made physical, and she thought about how often she tore apart her own clothes, objects she found, pieces of fabric gathered from the corners of the house, and how she stitched those together into something new. Nothing here, in this field, was stitched together; it was just broken.

They arrived at the end of a row and stood in front of the last car in the line. Kavinsky opened the back door and ushered her in. It turned out, the seats were missing from the inside of the car, or rather the seat backs were; the bottoms lined the inside of the car like benches, and on these Blue and Kavinsky sat.

Kavinsky reached over to twist the key in the ignition before rolling down the windows and turning the car back off. Digging in her pocket, she produced two green pills and rolled them between her fingers, jittery.

Blue reached over to grasp Kavinsky’s hand, reassuring, and said, “It’ll be fine.” She took both pills, tapped Kavinsky on the chin, and placed one of the pills on Kavinsky’s tongue. Kavinsky untwisted the cap of the water bottle she’d brought and swallowed, long and nervous. “Let’s kill destiny,” Blue said as she swallowed her own pill, and they slept.

 

 

 

 

Cabeswater thrashed.

Blue lay in a small clearing, clear and calm, but the forest floor around her roiled. Kavinsky, vines twisted around her ankles and creeping up her legs, struggled to her feet, pulling her arms from entangling briars before they could get a grip. She yelled, “Knock it off, you piece of shit! I’m not fucking taking anything! Fuck!”

Blue, feeling the edge of panic creep into her blood, closed her eyes and concentrated. She thought at Cabeswater, hard as she could, that they weren’t taking anything, like Kavinsky said, and that they just needed some help. Breathing deep, she focused on steadying her pulse, the ins and outs of her chest as she inhaled and exhaled, the feeling of the forest underneath her, the loam surrounding her fingers as she pressed into it, and then she projected this steadiness out to Cabeswater; she reassured the forest again that they weren’t here to hurt but they needed a favor.

Dimly, in the background, she heard Kavinsky’s steady stream of expletives subside, bit by bit, decibel by decibel. Blue slowly opened her eyes and watched the entangling vines recede back into the forest floor, waiting, doubtless, for any sign that Blue and Kavinsky would renege.

Stalking over to her, Kavinsky plopped down next to Blue in the clearing and pulled a thorn from her calf. A drop of blood welled out, and Kavinsky smeared it away. Blue reached over and pulled another from her thigh, caught in her shorts. It could have been worse, Blue knew, but she still felt guilty that Cabeswater had reacted this strongly to Kavinsky’s presence.

Mumbling, Kavinsky said, “I told you so,” and wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging them to her chest. She lay her cheek against her knees and looked over at Blue, who looked back, guilt a solid presence between them.

Blue mumbled back. “I thought you were exaggerating,” and Kavinsky laughed, thin and mirthless. “I’m sorry. It’s over now, though, and,” and here, Blue placed her fingers just at the edges of Kavinsky’s lips, “It’ll be worth it.”

Stilling, quiet, Kavinsky said, “Yeah, okay,” and Blue felt her mouth move underneath her fingertips. She drew her hand back and put her fingers to her own mouth, a kiss once removed. They sat there for a moment, surrounded by a Cabeswater that seemed at peace for now. Blue focused again on radiating calm and soothing peace, and the leaves above seemed to whisper back, holding their tenuous truce.

“I really am sorry,” Blue said. “We can go if you want. I didn’t think you’d be literally bleeding because of my idea.”

What might have been absolution in her eyes and in the curve of her mouth, Kavinsky said, “No pain, no gain,” and stood. She reached down to Blue who took her hands, just like they’d done every time they dreamed together. Just like Kavinsky was Ronan’s worst habit, Blue thought that maybe, against all odds, Kavinsky might be one of her best.

They clasped hands then and stared out at the forest, the summer heat cooling under the canopy and glancing off their skin. Blue looked over at Kavinsky and said, “Your entire thing is that you make ideas manifest, right? It’s just that, except,” and here she looked around at Cabeswater, “we aren’t taking anything out. You’re great at this. You know you’re great at this.”

Looking pleased and more steady than she had so far in this dream, Kavinsky squeezed Blue’s hand and nodded. Blue squeezed back, and together they closed their eyes.

Blue thought. She thought about her curse and her destiny and the way Noah’s lips had felt against hers. She thought of her future, unspooled out in front of her like a line, and she wondered what her mother would see in the lines of her palm. The lines—and she gasped because she could see her palm in the black behind her eyelids, heart and health and fate intersecting so much like the ley lines, like the symbol her mother drew on the shower door, that Neeve drew in the dust, that Gansey drew in her journal.

Maybe this was always meant to happen.

She concentrated on one intersection, where heart met fate, and wished. Her hand grew hot clasped with Kavinsky’s, heavy, burning, but she could feel Kavinsky tightening her own grip instead of letting go. Together they stood, energy coursing through their joined hands until—like a punch—it left, rocketing out of them and knocking them back a step, then two.

Blue opened her eyes and looked over at Kavinsky only to find her already looking back. Blue didn’t, at first, notice anything different; their hands, still clasped, looked the same, and—as she looked beyond Kavinsky—so did Cabeswater. Facing front, then, she noticed the difference.

Blue’s pulse rabbited. Before them were two figures standing hand in hand; one twisted with a mass of black briars, tangling and roiling and gnashing at each other in a mad fight to the surface. The shape of it suggested a person with head and arms and legs and chest, but the rest—the rest was just darkness and fear and uncertainty and loneliness, strangling-choking-slashing for breath. The briars chafed and undulated as they slid across each other, and Blue recoiled.

Next to it stood—nothing. Blackness. Emptiness. Like its fellow, it suggested the shape of a person, made the outline, but it was made of nothing, a void that Blue worried would draw her in and obliterate her. A black hole that sucked in everything around it until that all that chaos ceased to exist.

Again, Blue looked at Kavinsky and watched the blood drain out of her face, her lips cracked and white and her breaths coming shallowly. Blue followed her gaze to the void-creature and realized—those two things, those two horrible creatures, were meant to be them, were meant to be Blue and Kavinsky.

Through a glass darkly.

And now, she thought, it made sense. She looked at the writhing mass before her and tried to take a step forward, couldn’t. She looked down, and her feet—her feet were gone, replaced with the same tangled mass of vines she saw opposite her. They writhed, and now she could feel them creeping up her legs, slow and ravenous. She knew then that they would eat her up; nothing would be left of her in this place except for fear, and she was so tired of being afraid.

She looked to Kavinsky, still ashen, and then down at Kavinsky’s feet, darkness encroaching on her too. Kavinsky’s feet and calves were nothing, just suggestions, the void approaching her knees so much faster than Blue’s fear approached her own, and Blue said, “I’m sorry” before dropping Kavinsky’s hand.

She had to get to her mirror-figure. She knew Kavinsky’s void would devour her if she let it, and she couldn’t let it.

She closed her eyes and heard her mother— _Remember what we taught you about protecting yourself_ —even as she felt her fear prickling at the backs of her knees. Breathing deep, she relaxed her hands from fists and tried to focus. Instead, she could hear them: _You are one cute little battery_ and _You’re the table that everyone wants at Starbucks_. She willed them away and gasped a little as she did. She clenched her fists once again—she didn’t need to hear people telling her what she was, especially now that she could feel the worst parts of her creeping up her legs. Above her knees now. She could feel her legs choking, feel the veins in them elongate and slither out and transform into what, she was sure, would swallow her whole.

Squeezing her eyes closed tighter and tighter, she concentrated on all the things about herself that were ordinary—and oh, there were so many. The way the skin underneath her nose got unbearably chapped in the winter. How she pulled at hangnails until she left tiny, bloody furrows around her fingers. The way dogs on leashes wound around her legs until she laboriously untwisted herself. The weight of a tray at Nino’s. How she curled her toes under her blankets at night, even in summer, to keep them warm. The pattern of her hair, carefully twisted and arranged every morning. Maura, Calla, and Persephone baking in the kitchen and gently squabbling about it all. Gansey, Ronan, Adam, and Noah gazing up at her from their booth at Nino’s and smiling.

All these ordinary things—she’d spent so long wishing she weren’t ordinary, but all these ordinary things made her into who she was now, and with a jolt she opened her eyes and threw those ordinary things into a shield around her.

Feeling flooded back into her legs, all pins and needles, painful but for the relief they brought with them, and she looked down. Ordinary again. She wiggled her toes and looked back up at the mirror-figure in front of her, still writhing, and then she looked back at Kavinsky. The void had crept up above her hips, and the expression on her face—Blue nearly started toward her before remembering there was only one way to fix this.

She faced the figure and, finally, took a step forward. The figure took a step forward as well, or appeared to, but only Blue moved; emboldened by this, the only one in these woods not trapped, she took another step, and another, and another, until she stood right in front of the ugly bulk of it. Reaching out her hand, she touched the smooth, cool surface of it, her fingertips sliding easily across.

“It’s a mirror,” she breathed. “The whole thing. It’s all just a mirror,” for now she looked away from the two figures reflected in it and down the long line on either side; the mirror stretched endlessly, and Blue couldn’t distinguish the top of it or where it ended. She guessed if she walked down its length, she might never find the end.

“This is it,” Blue said. “This is what Cabeswater gave me. K, we have to destroy it. Can’t you feel it? It feels wrong.” She looked back around to Kavinsky who, she saw, had closed her eyes. Her expression—she had no expression, her face wiped clean, her features flat and unanimated, and Blue’s pulse sped up again. She was afraid, not for herself any longer but for this serene version of Kavinsky, serene but for the void creeping up her body, so incongruous with Blue’s own writhing fear, the violence of it clashing against nothing, and it was the juxtaposition of the two that scared Blue most of all. Blue ran back toward and stopped just short, taking Kavinsky’s hand—still a regular hand—in hers. “K. Come on. Focus.” And with that, Kavinsky opened her eyes again, but Blue saw nothing in them. Like the void, although the slow creep of it hadn’t yet reached above her waist.

“Focus,” Blue said again and tightened her grip on Kavinsky’s hand. “It’s just a mirror. It’s just a bad imitation. You’re not—” and Blue didn’t know what to say next, wasn’t sure if her words would bounce off the mirror and disappear into the void in front of her. “K, you’re not—nothing. You hear me? You’re not nothing. Snap out of it!”

And Blue saw something flicker then in Kavinsky’s eyes, and she breathed deep in relief. “I need you to focus. I need—we need to destroy it, and I need your help.” She took Kavinsky’s other hand in hers and tugged, stepping backward toward the mirror, pulling Kavinsky with her.

They stood in front of the mirror and in front of their mirror-figures, Blue a whole, human girl and Kavinsky still half a void. Glancing down at Kavinsky’s waist, Blue saw that the encroaching void had halted and had, by inches, started to recede, retreating from the nearness of Blue’s hands in Kavinsky’s. Kavinsky then reached slowly out toward the glass, curling her fingers just before touching it, and then finally bridging the gap to the cold surface.

Again, Blue said, “We need to destroy it,” and Kavinsky nodded, sluggish.

“Time for me to pull my weight,” Kavinsky said, slurred and hoarse, and closed her eyes. Her brow furrowed and then she held a baseball bat in one hand, something from nothing, and handed it to Blue.

Reaching out, Blue grasped the end of the bat, metal and matte black. She remembered the feeling of her mirror-figure swallowing her up, and she didn’t know how Kavinsky managed it, how she dreamed up exactly what Blue needed while feeling this—this terror—although Blue supposed that maybe Kavinsky didn’t feel afraid but rather felt nothing, and then she wondered—

She wondered how often Kavinsky felt nothing and dreamed anyway.

The bat was heavy in Blue’s hand, heavier than she was expecting, and she knew she was meant to swing it.

She swung.

Connected.

The jolt of it traveled up both her arms, shivered her fingers, pulled the muscles in her shoulders. The mirror stuttered, cracks spidering out in both directions from those first, violent wounds. Again she swung, and her mirror-figure writhed, the vines of it twisting in animalistic agony, trying desperately to escape. Blue would not let it escape. It seemed to shriek and wail, piercing through the rustle of the forest and the blood pounding in Blue’s ears.

And with that shriek, pitched high and sharp, the mirror cracked even more, and those cracks widened until she could see Cabeswater on the other side. She swung again and again, her arms heavy and tired, but she could feel the end, and she knew it was close. This was no ordinary mirror but a curse—

Curses would not be broken easily, but they would be broken in the end.

Blue looked back to Kavinsky; she was now more girl than void, and, for the first time since the beginning of this dream, she looked like she felt it. Holding the bat out to her, Blue said, “Your turn.”

Kavinsky grasped the handle of it and swung—hard—and Blue guessed this swing contained all the empty helplessness she’d felt, trapped by nothingness. Cracks radiated, and Kavinsky hammered again and again at the mirror-figure before her, the void that sucked in everything around it and rendered it immaterial. Soon, that figure too had disappeared into a thousand tiny pieces in the mirror, just shards and cracks.

Kavinsky handed the bat back to Blue and said, “Finish it.”

And so Blue finished it. She looked at the space between what had formerly been her and Kavinsky’s mirror-figures, a space with only a few cracks spiderwebbing across, aimed, and swung.

The mirror shivered and then splintered into a thousand pieces. Up and down its length it shattered, and the pieces fell to the forest floor, and they dissolved into the ground like water. The mirror-figures, fear and nothing, were gone, and Blue took a deep breath, the feeling of it making her dizzy. She looked at Kavinsky who was again fully herself, and Kavinsky smiled full-force back at her.

Blue could feel something building in her chest, building and building until she burst into a prolonged screech—pure, youthful exhilaration. Kavinsky laughed and clapped her hands and shouted too before grabbing Blue and hoisting her up; Blue wrapped her legs around Kavinsky’s waist and laughed with her.

Blue, arms around Kavinsky’s neck, asked, “Did it work?” and then said, “Wait. I don’t want to find out here. Let’s go, okay?”

“Yeah, babe, let’s go,” Kavinsky said, sounding just as exhilarated as Blue felt, and walked back to the clearing still holding Blue up. Kavinsky knelt and stroked Blue’s hair and said, “Let’s go,” before laying the both of them down.

Just before closing her eyes, Blue thanked Cabeswater, listened to the rustle of the leaves, and felt, for the time, perfectly content.

 

 

 

 

Blue woke with Kavinsky’s face inches from hers, peering at her and willing her awake. She still lay on the half-seat in the car, and Kavinsky now knelt by Blue’s bench with both elbows by Blue’s arm and her chin on her hands. Blue said hoarsely, “Did it work?”

“Only one way to find out,” Kavinsky said, shrugging, and she grinned.

Blue, practical, started immediately thinking through scenarios. “Are you sure? What if that was just some random mirror that had nothing to do with me? What if I’m just as cursed as before? What if—”

Kavinsky cut her off. “We did it. You felt it, and I felt it. Time to experiment.”

Blue looked at her, studying her eyes. They were black, and she wondered how she never noticed, although she supposed they’d never been this close, not like this anyway, their faces lined up just so. The air was thick with tension, and Blue could feel it. She tried to relax back into the seat and echoed, “Time to experiment.”

Achingly slow, Kavinsky leaned forward onto one elbow and reached over to put her hand on the other side of Blue, bracketing her in. Blue watched Kavinsky’s eyes flick between her eyes and her lips as she leaned closer, closer, closer....

“Wait,” Blue said, putting her hand on Kavinsky’s chest. “Wait-wait-wait.” She pushed, and she felt Kavinsky give, just a little, just enough, and she felt her own heart swell and then break. “I can’t do this.” She pushed harder, and Kavinsky sat back and up. “I can’t do this yet.” She saw the expression on Kavinsky’s face, hurt and sad, and she knew it was mirrored on her own, but she couldn't—wouldn’t—risk it.

“Please take me home,” Blue said. “I need to check. I just—I need to know first.”

Kavinsky didn’t argue, and Blue thought that was worse than anything. They walked back to the car together; Blue glanced at Kavinsky’s hands, which were shoved deep in her pockets, and clasped her own wrist to keep from reaching out.

In the car, Blue asked, “You understand, right? Look, it’s probably nothing. We probably did it but I can’t—I don’t want to risk it. I don’t want to risk you.”

“I don’t give a shit about risks,” Kavinsky replied. “Obviously.”

Blue thought about the risk Kavinsky had just taken—for her—and she nodded.

Kavinsky continued. “Look—” and she breathed deep before laying her head back against the headrest and looking over at Blue. “Are you coming to the Fourth? You should, you know, no matter what.”

Blue nodded again and, in that moment, felt the mood shift, bleak to a glimmer of hope in a blink. “I’ll come, no matter what,” and she smiled.

Smiling back, a little, Kavinsky drove her home.

After parking in front of Blue’s house, Kavinsky said, “I got some stuff to do before the party. Have to be a good hostess and all. I’ll swing by at nine?”

Blue got out of the car, shut the door, and leaned back in through the window. “See you at nine.” Kavinsky saluted with two fingers and, after Blue stepped back, drove off. Blue turned to face her house and walked up to the door, hesitating before turning the doorknob and crossing the threshold.

She could hear Maura clattering in the kitchen. A whisk scraped furiously against a glass bowl, and Blue knew what this meant. Blue’s family tended to bake not with love but with worry, but Blue didn’t think anything they made tasted the worse for it, housekeeping platitudes be damned. Maura had, doubtless, felt what she and Kavinsky were doing; _accurate, but not specific_ , Blue always heard her say, so while she may not know the specifics, she would surely know if and when her only daughter upended the entire universe.

Fidgeting with the hem of her shirt, Blue walked into the kitchen; Maura whirled on her in a rush before stopping and standing still, looking her over. “Blue?” she asked and then held out her arms wide, wide enough to hold the whole world plus one teenage girl.

Blue stepped into them and burst into tears. “Oh, honey,” she heard her mom say as she stroked Blue’s hair. Burying her face in Maura’s shoulder, Blue concentrated on the feeling of her mother’s hand, smoothing from temple to nape, again and again. For a few more moments they stayed there together in the kitchen, melted butter cooling on the counter and birds outside welcoming the afternoon.

Blue remembered the crack of the mirror, the sound of the glass crashing to the ground, and flinched. She said, “I broke something, and I don’t know if I broke myself.” As soon as she said it out loud, voiced it into being, she started to worry, and then she remembered the dream feeling of fear creeping up her legs. She didn’t know if she was the same as she was before, minus the curse, or if she’d changed something immutable about herself in the process. Messing around with magic you didn’t understand always came with a price, and Blue didn’t want to pay it.

Wiping her tears on Maura’s shirt and stepping back, Blue tried not to feel too bad about the watery marks she left behind. She looked up at her mother whose eyes weren’t quite dry either. Blue asked, “Am I—I mean, am I still me?”

“Well, let’s see,” Maura said as she led Blue toward the reading room. She handed the tarot deck to Blue who shuffled and pulled a card. After handing the card to Maura, she sat on the sofa and pulled her knees up to her chest. Maura sat beside her and pulled her in with one arm. In her other hand she held the card, and this she flipped over.

The page of cups. Blue’s card.

“There she is,” said Maura gently, one hand cradling Blue’s head, fingers a warm pressure against her temple. “She even looks like you. No matter what, she’ll always look like you.”

Blue tried not to sniffle. “I’m okay?”

“You’re okay,” Maura said, thumb still stroking.

Blue breathed for what felt like the first time in a month. She was okay. Of second importance, “Did it work?”

She felt her mother smile, and she knew then that it had. “Blue, I can’t say I’m thrilled with all your choices lately, but it did. Your true love, or loves, all of them, have nothing to fear from you, and you have nothing to fear from them.”

“I’m okay. I’m okay,” Blue repeated. “It worked,” and she felt a great weight lift from her shoulders as a gentle weariness took its place, her horizons expanding as far as she could see, and it overwhelmed just as it awed. She’d been locked up as long as she could remember, and now the kaleidoscope of possibilities dazzled and danced in front of her eyes, too much at once.

Blue’s eyelids drooped, grew leaden, and she couldn’t keep them open. She tipped over into her mother’s lap and clutched at the fabric there. Distantly, she heard Maura say, “I’m proud of you,” and with that, Blue slept.

-

She woke, disoriented, and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. The room around her was dark, light spilling in from the door cracked open, and she saw a figure perched on the end of the sofa; she startled.

“Okay, chill,” said the figure who Blue expertly identified as Orla. “You’re wound up tight. My advice? Go get some.”

Blue sat up and scrounged around for a pillow, which she threw directly at Orla’s head. Ducking, Orla laughed as she dodged out of the room. She poked her head back in the door, long enough to say whip-fast, “Lay one on her!” and retreat to safety.

Blue relaxed against the sofa and then bolted up again. What time was it? She peered out the window; the long, slow afternoon had faded into a long, slow evening in the way that only summer could, and the evening was dim outside the reach of the front door’s light. Blue rocketed out the door of the reading room—no clocks in that room, and Blue often told her mother that psychics and casinos shouldn’t have so much in common—and into the kitchen.

Half past eight. Blue breathed and turned to face Maura, Calla, and Persephone who were clustered around the kitchen table. They looked between themselves and back to Blue before each giving her a piece of advice. From Persephone: “Have fun, dear.” From Calla, “Dogs usually have fleas.” And from Maura: “Blue,” a pause, “be safe. Remember our talk—”

“Mom!” Blue cut her off. “Yes, oh my God, I remember.” She could feel her cheeks flushing red, so she turned and escaped upstairs before it could get worse. Thinking about their advice, she wasn’t quite sure if it meant the same thing or if it meant different things, and then she decided she really didn’t want to think about it at all.

She arranged her hair into tufts with Kavinsky’s gifted hair clips and selected her most shredded layers to mark the occasion. It was so strange to think that she and Kavinsky had been caught in this dance for an entire year even if they hadn’t realized it for most of that time. She felt ready for it to end and just as ready for everything to begin, for she knew that everything was about to change.

She bounded down the stairs and narrowly avoided barreling into her mother. Maura reached out and hugged her, second time that day, and while Blue and her family had never shied away from physical affection, this seemed excessive—especially now that Blue had somewhere to be.

“I mean it,” Maura said. “Be careful. Be you.”

“I will,” Blue assured her, and hugged her tightly back. “Promise.”

Blue detached herself and opened the front door, turning to wave a little at her mother, and then walked out. At the end of the walk, she waited, the evening around her growing darker and darker. She knew by this point the families would have emptied out of the drag strip, loathe to participate in Kavinsky’s Fourth activities and more than willing to catch a fireworks display somewhere safer. Last year, Blue had stayed long enough to see a lot of K’s fireworks, but she’d left before the infamous one, the one that had—only rumor—alerted the CIA. She didn’t quite know what to expect this year, and she was forever unsure about most of Kavinsky’s various illicit activities, but she couldn’t help the tingle of anticipation at the edges of her fingers and toes.

In the distance an engine roared, and Blue smoothed her hands down her shirt and shorts, prodded her hair to make sure it was in place. She dug the tip of a boot into the grass and clasped her hands behind her back, nervous.

She was going to a Kavinsky party.

Soon enough, Kavinsky pulled up, the night black around her and her car gleaming in the streetlights.

As Blue slid into the car, she thought about how exactly she was going to answer Kavinsky’s inevitable question—if their dream adventure had worked—but Kavinsky didn’t ask. Instead, she looked over and asked, sly edge to her voice, “Are you ready?” before shifting her way through more gears than the trip to the drag strip warranted.

Blue was ready, more than ready, and so her nerves thrummed in time with the turn of the engine. They nosed into the strip, passing groups of spectators holding red solo cups, a few of them pounding on the roof of Kavinsky’s car and laughing as Kavinsky drove by. Kavinsky herself was lit up, Blue noticed, and she wondered if Kavinsky felt the same edge of excitement as she did.

Kavinsky and Blue both got out of the car, and Kavinsky held up one finger to Blue. “One sec,” she said before jumping on the hood of her car and climbing on the roof. She stood, then, the tallest thing in the field, and Blue craned her neck to look up at her. Kavinsky held both arms wide and shouted, same thing she’d said to Blue earlier, “Are you ready?” loud over the thumping bass, and the crowd howled. She held one arm high over her head and snapped her fingers.

The first shrill shriek of a firework sounded out over the crowd and then exploded in a deafening boom overhead; red, white, and blue sparks lit up the sky and reflected in the eyes of the partygoers as they whooped and hollered, and the sound of the fireworks and the revelry threatened to drown out even the pounding music. Kavinsky stepped down the rear windshield of the car and sat on the trunk, legs through the gap between the spoiler and the trunk and heels braced on the narrow lip of the bumper. She quirked an eyebrow at Blue and grinned, illuminated by another explosion in the sky.

Blue smiled back and walked over to Kavinsky. Bracing her hands on the top of the spoiler, she took one, great step up to the lip of the bumper and another to hoist herself over. She sat beside Kavinsky so that two pairs of legs poked out through the spoiler, and there they sat together.

Kavinsky leaned one elbow on the spoiler, head in hand, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Another firework exploded overhead as she asked, “So, lady, do you have something to tell me?”

Blue laid one hand on Kavinsky’s cheek, running her thumb over the high curve of her cheekbone and forefinger stroking the soft skin behind her ear. Blue leaned in close, their foreheads tipped together and lips close. “I don’t actually,” Blue said, and she felt her heart stutter and start again as she felt the ghost of a smile broke out full on Kavinsky’s face.

“Yeah?” asked Kavinsky.

Blue said softly back, “Yeah,” and tugged her down against the rear windshield. Tilting toward her, Blue again laid one hand on Kavinsky’s cheek and leaned closer closer closer to press their lips together.

The feeling of it rocketed through her, just this one, tiny, chaste kiss, and Blue smiled against Kavinsky’s mouth. She supposed she shouldn’t be smiling—she should be kissing, making up for lost time, but she couldn’t quite make herself stop. She felt Kavinsky smile too, and there they laughed with noses pressed to cheeks and mouths barely touching.

Kavinsky’s lips were warm, soft, dry, and without thinking Blue licked her own lips to make up for it; her tongue touched Kavinsky’s lips, and at this Kavinsky hummed and murmured, “Woah, what happened to taking it slow?” before nudging Blue on her back and leaning over her. “Let’s do this right,” she said.

Blue looked up at her, fireworks bursting overhead, booming and crackling. She could feel it vibrating in her chest and in the car beneath her, although maybe this too was just simple anticipation, nothing more than the blood thrumming through her veins making itself manifest. Kavinsky still smiled down at her, silhouetted, and then she blotted out the light above her as she leaned down.

Eyes closed, Blue felt Kavinsky feather a kiss to her forehead, then her temple, her right eyelid and the curve of her cheekbone, then her left. Kavinsky kissed the tip of her nose, and Blue felt her lips curve up, and Blue herself laughed. And then, the edge of her jaw, her right earlobe, her chin, the very edge of her lips, her left eyebrow. All of it tickled, a little, but more than than it thrilled through Blue, through her fingers and the tips of her toes, through her chest and arms and thighs, through the backs of her knees and the insides of her elbows, and she reached up to run one hand down Kavinsky’s back.

At that, Kavinsky kissed Blue on the lips, and Blue sighed against her. Kavinsky withdrew and then kissed her again and again, gently each time, and again Blue smiled. Smiling too, Kavinsky moved to Blue’s jaw and whispered, “Next time—” and here Blue felt Kavinsky’s lips close over the last syllable against her skin— “Next time, you’re driving,” and Blue felt Kavinsky’s mouth curve up in a smile against her jaw.

Blue laughed. “Why would I when I have you?”

“Because, babe, it’ll be hot. Trust me.”

“Okay,” Blue said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

And there they lay together, under stars shimmering in the night sky and fireworks bursting overhead, hands clasped, happy and young and endless.


End file.
